Holy s___!

  

If you’ve been reading my posts regularly, you know that I’m focusing less and less on projecting the growth in reported COVID-19 cases (and as of today, I’m not going to project it at all, just report yesterday’s total case number and the 1- and 3-day rates of change). As just about any schoolchild can tell you, the reported cases are severely biased down due to the lack of testing capacity. Instead of projecting deaths based on cases, I’m simply projecting deaths based on deaths. I’m taking the most recent three-day growth rate of deaths and trending it out into the future. Is this accurate? Of course not. I’m sure the numbers will be way off, especially as we go out. But will they be lower or higher? There’s no way of knowing. Which brings me to the very disturbing item I noticed when I looked at yesterday’s COVID-19 death numbers a little while ago.

Yesterday, I projected that today would be the day when total Covid-19 deaths today alone would surpass 9/11 (but I would only know if that were true tomorrow, since I base all of my numbers on yesterday’s figures). Yet when I plugged the total deaths number for yesterday into my spreadsheet, it showed yesterday’s increase from Wednesday the 15th was over 6,000! That is, yesterday’s deaths equaled two 9/11’s, not just one.

I thought this total must be wrong, so I looked at the figure that Worldometers now gives for total deaths (which is the number they publish, not daily deaths. To get yesterday’s daily deaths, you need to subtract the previous day’s total deaths figure from yesterday’s) as of two days ago (the 15^th). It turns out that was much higher than the number I had in my spreadsheet, meaning Worldometers had revised that up (which has happened before). But when I looked at the 14^th, I saw that number had also been revised up, yet the number for the 13^th had barely changed. This means Worldometers revised the number for the 14^th so that it was over 6,000 above the 13^th, after initially reporting an increase of around 2,000.

So we exceeded the 9/11 total in one day on the 14^th, not today; and not only did we exceed it, we exceeded it by two times! This means that yesterday’s 3-day growth rate in daily deaths was 46%, not the 27% I expected it to be. Since I use the latest 3-day growth rate to generate all of my projected deaths numbers going forward, this of course substantially increases all of those projections, as shown below. In a few days (maybe even today), we’ll look back wistfully at the time when we thought 3,000 deaths on a single day was a lot. In fact, I’m projecting total deaths for April will be 211,000 now, which works out to over 7,000 deaths per day – more than twice the 9/11 total, for every day this month.

And what about total deaths for May? You can look at the numbers below; I’ll just point out that I’m now projecting a total May number that’s ten times higher than the one I projected yesterday. And it’s all because the April 14 daily deaths number was over 6,000, rather than over 2,000 as initially reported. We’re about to learn a very powerful – and very costly - lesson in what exponential growth means.

Why did deaths jump so significantly on April 14? I’m sure it’s because of the 3,700 deaths that New York decided to add to its total on that day – it seems that Worldometers waited a day to include those deaths in their number. These were people who had died in NYC, since the beginning of the pandemic, without going to the hospital - but were almost certainly infected with COVID-19, based on their symptoms. Of course, these are some – but just some – of the actual deaths that were never reported. But of course, this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of unreported cases out there (remember, these 3,700 people were never tested, so they weren’t in total reported cases, either). That total includes people who never showed symptoms, as well as those who did but didn’t bother to get tested, presumably because of the hassle of proving they were sick enough to require a test.

Someone called me a fear monger today, based on yesterday’s post. I had to ask him what he thinks I am now, since the projections in yesterday’s post were a fraction of what they are in today’s post. If I’m a fear monger, I’ve been pulling my punches!

I know (and hope) some of you will write to me and tell me these numbers can’t be right. I also hope they’re not right. But also tell me why you think they’re not. Don’t tell me there are all sorts of promising treatments out there, etc. I know there are, but face it – it’s highly unlikely any of them could be deployed in wide enough quantities to change the projections for May, let alone April.

And don’t tell me that a three-day growth rate of 47% simply isn’t sustainable. From March 17 through April 1, the same rate averaged over 100%.  If we were fighting a human enemy, you could assume that, after inflicting so much damage on us, they would let up at some point, knowing we were already reeling and thinking of what would happen to their families if we regained the offensive and put them in the same position. However, as of the last time I checked, the coronavirus isn’t human and doesn’t care about our rules.

Finally, don’t tell me that at least the May death numbers are likely to be much lower, because we’ll finally figure out how to fight the coronavirus. Guess what? We figured it out a month or two ago. It requires locking down the country until we can say we know who almost all the sick people are, and can trace their contacts and quarantine them. Yet all of the movement in the White House, and a few of the states, is now in the opposite direction: We’re going to start selectively freeing up the economy, and accept that there will be higher death rates. Although I notice that the people who are “accepting” the higher death rates aren’t the ones who will actually do the dying. This just goes to show that everyone has their own role nowadays. Some people guide policy, while others die because the policymakers got it wrong. Don’t you just love specialization?

I. Numbers based on total deaths, reported and projected

(All of the numbers below are based on reported deaths, not reported cases. The reported cases number is the basis for the set in stone deaths numbers above; however, there’s general agreement that reported cases are some fraction of actual cases. So the projections below are going to be much more accurate estimates of deaths than the ones above, at least in the shorter term)

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 34,617

Increase in deaths since previous day: 2,174

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 7%  

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 46%  

Reported Covid-19 deaths during week ending:

March 7: 16 (2 deaths/day)

March 14: 38 (138% increase over previous week, 5 deaths/day)

March 21: 244 (542% increase, 35 deaths/day)

March 28: 1,928 (690% increase, 275 deaths/day)

April 4: 6,225 (23% increase, 889 deaths/day)

April 11: 12,126 (95% increase, 1,732 deaths/day. That is more than the total deaths on the Titanic, every day)

Projected Covid-19 deaths during week ending:

April 18: 26,889 (122% increase over previous week, 3,841 deaths/day)

April 25: 60,735 (126% increase, 8,676 deaths/day. In other words, close to three times the deaths on 9/11, every day)

Total deaths for April: 211,365 (7,045 per day. In other words, twice as many people will die of Covid-19 in April than died of all causes in US wars since WWII. Daily deaths will be more than twice the 9/11 toll).

May 2: 182,600 (201% increase, 26,086 deaths per day)

May 9: 383,376 (110% increase, 54,768 deaths per day)

May 16: 858,827 (124% increase, 122,690 deaths per day)

May 23: 2,582,088 (201% increase, 368,870 deaths per day)

May 30: 5,421,191 (110% increase, 774,456 deaths per day)

Total deaths for May: 9,954,483 (321,112 deaths per day)

Projected deaths for each day equals the previous day’s deaths, grown by yesterday’s 3-day percentage growth rate in new deaths, which as of today is 46%. The weekly number is the sum of the projected deaths for the 7-day period. Note that my estimated case mortality rate doesn’t affect these projections at all.

II. Numbers based on reported cases

Total US confirmed cases: 678,210

Increase in cases since previous day: 33,862 (vs. 30,102 increase yesterday)

Percent increase in cases since yesterday: 5% (vs. 5% yesterday)

Percent increase in cases since 3 days previous: 16% (vs. 15% yesterday)

Note: At this point two days ago, I would have reported various “set in stone” death numbers, which were projections of minimum total deaths over the course of the pandemic, based solely on the current growth rate in reported cases. However, when compared to the projections in Section I above, which are based just on reported deaths, these numbers are now ridiculously low. For example, my spreadsheet shows a set in stone deaths number of 188,000. By the middle of May, I’m projecting daily deaths will be greater than that. From now on, I’m just going to report the above actual numbers regarding cases, and not do any projections based on them.

III. Reported case mortality rate so far in the pandemic in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 57,844

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 34,617

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 37% (vs. 40% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 37% of them have resulted in death. Of course, this number will come down as time goes on and more cases are closed in which the victim recovered. But this number has gone down and up since Worldometers started publishing the recovery rate on March 26 (when it was 41%), and on about half the days, it’s gone up; there is still no sign of a downward trend, and other countries like Italy and France show comparable percentages.