BUSINESS BUZZ
HOPE on the Horizon
By Elizabeth Morse Read
W
e see it non-stop on TV, our cell phones, in magazines, and even in our dreams. It’s the screensaver from hell: a swarm of golf balls studded with cocktail toothpicks ending in red bubbles. Those cocktail toothpicks surround the golf ball like a crown (corona) and those “bubbles” are the COVID-19 virus’ “spike proteins,” which latch onto our cells and allow the virus to enter and infect us with a plague of Biblical proportions. And whether you call it SARS-CoV-2, coronavirus, or COVID-19, it has overwhelmed the world’s population, health systems, and economies. In less than a year, COVID-19 has become the leading cause of death in the US, leapfrogging over cancer and heart disease. And almost every 30 seconds, another American dies of it. We are on the cusp of a catastrophe.
What’s wrong with this picture?
The United States represents less than 5% of the global population, yet we have almost 25% of the world’s COVID-19 infections and deaths – more than any other nation. How is it that the entire
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continent of Africa, with its 1.3 billion people, has recorded 52,000 deaths compared to the staggering totals here? Both South Korea and the US reported its first case of COVID-19 on January 21, 2020 – yet, South Korea had reported fewer than 600 total deaths, compared to the projected 362,000 American deaths by January 1. In early December, the US first recorded 200,000 confirmed new cases in a single day, more than all cases ever recorded in Japan, a country of 127 million people, since the beginning of the pandemic. But the daily “confirmed” cases don’t tell the whole story. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that, due to a lack of widespread testing and tracing in 2020, only one in eight infections have actually been identified. In addition, the CDC believes that as many as 40% of infected people are asymptomatic “silent spreaders” responsible for causing at least half of all other known infections. After so many Americans ignored public health warnings about not traveling or gathering for Thanksgiving, the national
January 2021 | The South Coast Insider
surge increased exponentially in December: over 100,000 hospitalized, and the highest daily death toll since the pandemic began – 3,100. That’s more than Japan’s ten-month total of 2,161 deaths, more than all who died on 9/11, and more than all who perished at Pearl Harbor. And Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that a similar surge after Christmas and New Year’s Eve would bring the country “to a really dark time” by mid-January. It took 98 days from the first reported infection in the US to reach one million confirmed cases. Four million new infections were recorded in November alone (double that of October) and another million new cases were confirmed in just the first five days of December, the next million in just three days. Confirmed cases could reach 20+ million by early January. And if this explosion is not tamped down, some experts predict there could be more than half a million Americans dead by April. The facts are mind-numbing and soul-crushing. We need a miracle.
The race for a cure
In December 2019, the Chinese govern-
