This week has seen significant decreases from peak case and fatality rates in much of the world, although in terms of countries, there are still 66 countries of various sizes where daily case counts continue to increase.

The big news this week is that with the notable exception of the coastal Northeast area most states in the United States as well as most countries around the world are announcing plans for removing or reducing certain restrictions on their populations.

Currently, we are in a transition period as various governments around the world wrestle with the details of removing restrictions on the economy without allowing a resurgence of cases.

This appears to be the “over the hump” week for much of the World. This is not a single global epidemic, but a series of linked regional epidemics. Each region is affected differently.

As you may remember from last week’s update, it was remarked that over the weekend, we would reach 1M cases globally. We actually reached that by Friday, April 3rd.

The first 100,000 cases took 3 months, the most recent 300,000 cases happened in 5 days. The total amount of cases is 838,000, and >1M are predicted by this weekend.

This week has been the institution of highly recommended or legally enforceable strict social distancing across much of the US.

Podcast regarding COVID-19 and its risk to millennials and older adults.

If your company has not instituted a broad work-from-home policy and does not know where to start, our medical director and in-house pandemic expert, Dr. Bill Lang, has put together a step-by-step guide on social distancing measures to implement in an office setting.

We are all feeling the impact of COVID-19 but what does social distancing actually mean and why is it so important to take it to heart?