July 7, 2020
By: Staff Report
SAINT PETERSBURG, Fla. – The media, including The Free Press, are constantly reporting new COVID-19 cases to the public, and the numbers can be alarming.
“10,000 cases in one day”, the state of Florida reported. That’s a huge and scary number, especially for one day.
As testing for COVID-19 increases, as will case totals. With mandatory mask orders in place, in Pinellas County and surrounding counties, we should start to see the case numbers drop. Lots of cases, but what about mortality rates?
We decided to take a look at the percentage rates of death from these cases and use not only the Florida dashboard for these numbers but also the John’s Hopkins tracking dashboard for COVID-19 as well.
One thing we would like to add, we don’t use the word coronavirus. There are many variations of coronaviruses (listed below) so, not to confuse anyone on what it is we are talking about, we use COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2, which is the pandemic we are dealing with globally. The variations of coronavirus are as follows:
Common human coronaviruses
- 229E (alpha coronavirus)
- NL63 (alpha coronavirus)
- OC43 (beta coronavirus)
- HKU1 (beta coronavirus)
Other human coronaviruses
- MERS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS)
- SARS-CoV (the beta coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS)
- SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus that causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19)
John’s Hopkins offers an incredible Q&A on coronaviruses for readers to understand more about coronaviruses in general and particularly COVID-19.
I will also note that the Johns Hopkins tracking dashboard, by state, appears to be slightly lower counts than the Florida Department of Health Dashboard.
Now, for the numbers:
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