Some horrible news, although not totally bleak

TA notice: Since it is now clear I’ll be writing posts on the coronavirus pandemic for a while (would it weren’t so!), but since I also don’t want to neglect my normal subject, which is cybersecurity and compliance for the electric power industry, I may on same days write both types of post (this post is on the pandemic). However, since the email feed only picks up the most recent post at the end of the day, you may have received this even though you’re just interested in the cyber posts. If that is the case, it would be a good idea to check my blog’s top page https://tomalrichblog.blogspot.com/, to see if there is a cyber post below this one.

The New York Times, in this article today, states that, if nothing is done (primarily social distancing), the US will experience 2.2 million deaths, not 1.7 million as in an estimate I heard over the weekend and reported in yesterday’s post.[i]

Of course, the key here is that this number is based on nothing being done. As we all know, something is being done, since many states and municipalities are taking matters into their own hands - mainly banning meetings and closing restaurants and schools. And the Trump Administration weighed in yesterday – based on this report – by requesting that gatherings be limited to ten people, rather than 50 as they’d said over the weekend.

However, I should point out that the Times article said a draft of the report had been sent to the White House a week ago, meaning they took their time to study the issue and make sure this was the right thing to do. In any other situation, this would be admirable. But you have to weigh this against the strong likelihood that this delay cost a lot of lives. For example, had the Wuhan lockdown in China been instituted one day earlier, this would have prevented 20,000 cases (and by the same token, had it been instituted one day afterwards, there would have been more than 20,000 additional cases, since the infection curve was of course growing exponentially at that point) – this according to the great article I read Saturday morning, which set off my whole chain of posts (and BTW, that article has had 35 million hits in the past week).

Let’s assume for the moment that the US population is equal to the city of Wuhan’s; this means that, had the WH taken action even five days earlier than they did, they would have prevented 100,000 new cases. But even that could be an underestimate, since Wuhan was put on a total lockdown, and I don’t believe there is any community in the US (other than New Rochelle, NY?) that is on total lockdown now. And using a mortality rate from the virus of two percent (almost certainly low), this means just the five-day delay will have caused 2,000 deaths!

Do you begin to see what exponential growth means? And why any hesitation at all at this point is literally murderous? Right now, there’s absolutely no reason not to use any weapon we have to fight the virus.

Which brings me to what the Administration did yesterday, which was again way behind what’s needed. What’s needed is clearly a total lockdown of the US, period – including grounding of all flights. Of course, this will cost the economy big time. But guess what? The minimum figure an epidemiologist gave over the weekend for total Covid-19 deaths was 80,000, which BTW is greater than all war deaths of Americans since the Korean War (i.e. it includes deaths in the Vietnam war, which were 57,000).

Even if there are just (“just!!”) 80,000 deaths, which looks less likely all the time, this is going to have a huge impact on the economy, as well as of course the families of the people who died. Any investment that can be made in limiting the number of deaths – and currently, every 5 minutes’ delay in ordering a total lockdown will cost at least seven deaths, using the 2,000/day number I just quoted – will pay for itself many times over in terms of healthy Americans (and especially in Americans who are alive, rather than the alternative).

While I was writing this, two news stories appeared. The first said that Mayor De Blasio announced today that there may be a “shelter-in-place” order (i.e. lockdown, to some degree) in 48 hours for New York City. The second said that non-essential Federal government workers are being sent home. So lockdown is happening incrementally. I predict that by next week there will be total lockdown across the country – too bad it won’t start today.

I’d like to say at this point something like “Don’t worry, if we all pitch in, we’ll come out of this all right.” It’s too late for that. A lot of Americans aren’t going to come out of this at all, let alone “all right”. At this point, we have no better option than to reduce the number that don’t come out of it as much as we can.

---

[i] This article is marred by the fact that someone made a terrible mistake in the first graph. Just now, I commented to the reporter, Sheri Fink, on Facebook: “Sheri, the first graph in your article purports to show 2.2 million deaths PER DAY at the peak. This is clearly a mistake - please tell me it is! - but it should be corrected now. It also shows Great Britain's total deaths (i.e. the area under the curve) as > those of the US, even though GB only is shown as having a total of 510,000. I think this graph should be fixed promptly or else removed. Essentially, it now says that the entire population of GB and the US will be wiped out.”

Note from Tom on Tuesday: It's about 12 hours since I messaged Sheri, and the graph remains unchanged. She is both an MD and PhD and has won or shared two Pulitzer Prizes, but I can't believe that such an egregious error has gone so long without being fixed. Unless, of course, this was actually what she intended to convey in this graph, in which case it solves the problem of whether to go to my high school reunion this fall.

Note from Tom on Wednesday: The graph is fixed. The left axis is deaths per day per 100,000 population, which explains both of the anomalies I referred to above.