Teaching a dangerous lesson

  

To begin, I want to make it clear that the title of this post doesn’t refer to President Trump’s musings yesterday – unfortunately, on live TV – that maybe treating Americans with massive doses of ultraviolet light and generous glasses of disinfectant would be the way to stop coronavirus infections. There may be one or two people who will try to put this ridiculous idea to the test – with likely fatal consequences – but this will ultimately pass away like his previous speculations about hydroxychloroquine and other possible miracle cures. But it does make you wonder: Why is this guy in charge of our response to the coronavirus pandemic? Can’t we find an expert to run the response, and let President Trump concern himself with other matters like making hand-washing videos?

What I’m referring to is a column in the Wall Street Journal today by Joseph C. Sternberg titled “Maybe the Experts Were Right About Covid-19 the First Time”. Sternberg’s argument is basically:

1. Early in the pandemic (and I think he means early March, not February), “experts” said there was no way we could “vanquish” the coronavirus. The only thing we could hope for was to control its spread, so that the hospital system wasn’t overwhelmed.
2. “Officials” also understood that “public patience with draconian measures would wear thin quickly” and they demanded that public officials “exercise caution when asking the public to take on burdens”.
3. The country clearly has made the decision (ignoring the wonderful advice put out by the WSJ editorial page up until a few days ago, I might add) to go with draconian measures, which he interprets to mean the decision has been made to defeat the virus, period.
4. He isn’t advocating this be changed, but by writing this column he clearly reserves the right to grouse in coming years about how the country paid a huge economic price which wasn’t really necessary.  

 Regarding the first two points, he doesn’t say who these experts and officials were, so we don’t have a good way to verify his claims. But I’m sure there were a few responsible people saying exactly those things.

Regarding item 3, I also don’t doubt the truth of the point that most states will stay with shelter-in-place orders, even though I would have said just the opposite a couple days ago. I say this because President Trump himself turned on a dime two days ago and rebuked Governor Kemp of Georgia for trying to open up too quickly (Kemp isn’t backing down, by the way, although it’s likely that people won’t flood into the movie theaters and hair salons in Georgia, even if they actually open in the first place); this was after Trump had encouraged Kemp and all other governors to pretty much throw away all of their social distancing measures last Friday. Assuming he doesn’t turn on a dime again on this issue, I believe the current shelter-in-place orders in about 2/3 of states will remain for at least another month.

But how about the second part of item 3: our acceptance of massive social distancing means that, as a society, Americans have decided to eliminate the coronavirus whatever the economic cost? I think that’s far from being true. We’re accepting massive social distancing because there’s no other way to control the virus at this point. Nobody seriously believes anymore it’s possible to eliminate the virus in the US, even if it might have been very early on (and that’s also very hard to believe).

And why is that? It all comes down to lack of adequate testing, which has been the case from Day 1 of this crisis. If we’d had adequate testing available in early February, when – as we now know – the virus already had a hold in the country and was being spread through everyday contact, we would have been able to do what South Korea did: find everybody who was sick, isolate them and trace their contacts. And we might have been able to control - but certainly not eliminate - the virus, as South Korea has done very successfully.

So we wouldn’t have had to do massive social distancing if testing had been available early on. But does that mean we’re condemned to endure it until a vaccine is developed and manufactured in quantity (which will be 1 ½ to 2 years at a minimum, and might never happen. Remember, 40 years after AIDS first appeared, there’s still no vaccine)?

The answer to that question is yes, unless we get our act together and develop enough testing that we can safely reopen the economy. It was a tragedy that we didn’t have the testing we needed in early February, so we could have avoided lockdowns. But it’s a greater tragedy that, when we started the lockdowns more than a month ago, we didn’t at the same time make a national concerted effort to develop more tests, and very quickly.

And here was another massive failure on the part of the White House: They didn’t use the tools available to them, such as the Defense Production Act, to force a big increase in test production (which isn’t a terribly difficult technological challenge). Not only that, but to this day (or at least this week), they continue to play down the obvious lack of testing capability – just look at Susan Birx’s comments on testing over last weekend. And she’s supposed to be one of the few adults in the room.

But here’s the deal: We will never be able to come out of our lockdown until massive testing is available, and until everyone who is sick is isolated, and all their contacts traced and isolated (and contact tracing is another capability that’s in very short supply, which would also definitely be fixable if someone in the White House thought this might…you know…be kind of a good thing to push for).

Emerging from lockdown has nothing to do with orders by governors, Trump, or anybody else. People won’t emerge from lockdown unless they’re convinced that the chance that they’ll get infected when they go to the store or work is relatively small. And they’ll never be convinced of that unless they know the person next to them has been recently tested and found negative. Of course, there’s always a chance that person was tested say a week ago and has become infected since then. But that’s much smaller than the near-certainty today that, if you go to the store, the person who waits on you has never been tested, and might even feel sick but has to keep working because they need the money.

I’ll concede for now it was a tragedy that there was inadequate testing available in early February. But I don’t call it a tragedy that we didn’t make an all-out effort to fix the problem in early March, when it became painfully clear how serious it was. And I definitely don’t call it a tragedy that we’re once again allowing the White House to try to “solve” the problem by denying it exists.

What do I call it? As the saying goes, tragedy repeated is farce. But farce doesn’t result in massive deaths. I guess I don’t really have a good word for it.

BTW, I hope you’ll at least glance through the numbers in the table below (which are simply projections of the current 3-day rate of increase in deaths). They’ve been going up and down, although for the last few days they’ve been going up. Up or down, they’re simply appalling. Just to highlight a few:

• In the first week of May (the week after next), we’ll average about 3,800 deaths every day, which is 800 more than on 9/11.
• During the entire month of May, we’ll average 11,000 deaths every day, i.e. close to four 9/11’s a day (or more than two Iraq Wars, if you prefer).
• From March through the end of June, we’ll have 2.2 million deaths.
• Scariest of all, of all closed Covid-19 cases in the US so far, 37% have resulted in death. And that number has changed not a bit since it was first available a month ago. If that were to be the true mortality rate at the end of the pandemic, you would have to multiply the numbers below by a factor of at least ten.

Sure, you don’t believe these numbers. But tell me what’s going to change them.

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into these numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 18%.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Pct. Change from previous week/month
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5	111%
March 21	244	35	542%
March 28	1,928	275	690%
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889	223%
April 11	12,126	1,732	95%
April 18	18,434	2,633	52%
April 25	17,330	2,476	-6%
Month of April	70,761	2,319	1715%
May 2	25,562	3,795	53%
May 9	40,555	5,794	53%
May 16	57,827	8,261	43%
May 23	85,462	12,209	48%
May 30	130,484	18,641	53%
Month of May	342,896	11,061	485%
June 6	186,059	26,580	43%
June 13	274,974	39,282	48%
June 20	419,834	59,976	53%
June 27	598,646	85,521	43%
Month of June	1,800,012	60,000	525%
Total March - June	2,217,727

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 50,243

Increase in deaths since previous day: 2,562 (vs. 2,338 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 5% (vs. 5% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 18% (used to project deaths in table below – was 18% yesterday)

II. Total reported cases

Total US confirmed cases: 886,709

Increase in cases since previous day: 37,617

Percent increase in cases since yesterday: 4%

Percent increase in cases since 3 days previous: 12%

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 85,922

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 50,243

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 37% (vs. 35% 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.