Drs. Birx and Fauci, why are you still working for this guy?

Drs. Birx and Fauci:

I have previously suggested to Dr. Fauci that he should leave this administration. Now I’m saying to both of you: What more do you need to do this? There are flashing red signs all over the place, yet you both seem to still think you can do more good on the inside of the administration than outside of it. But the fact is that you aren’t doing much good at all now, compared to the good that would be done if you both resigned effective immediately. Consider:

First, your guidelines for ending lockdowns in states were quite sensible: There needs to be a drop in new cases in the state. Tests need to be widely available, and anyone testing positive should be quarantined (away from their families, I might add). A robust infrastructure for contact tracing needs to be in place, and all recent contacts of people who have tested positive need to be tested as well. If any of those things aren’t in place, the lockdown needs to continue (although, if widespread testing were available, the lockdowns wouldn’t have to be statewide, but could be targeted at areas where the virus isn’t under control yet).

Trump announced the guidelines with you and got a lot of praise for them. Then, less than 12 hours later he completely reversed himself and started supporting the small number of astroturf protesters who appeared the next day in several state capitols. Even though he reversed course again and chastised the governor of Georgia’s move to open up the state – after initially supporting the idea, but then running into the not insignificant problem that the great majority of people in Georgia think it’s too early to reopen – he’s making it very clear now that he thinks every state should reopen, guidelines be damned.

Second, I’m sure you’ll agree that lack of adequate testing capability is hamstringing our efforts to fight the virus now, as it has from the very beginning. Trump and his wonderful son-in-law Jared Kushner have of course “solved” this problem by denying it exists.

They point out that the US has now tested over 6 million people and this is more, both in absolute and per capita terms, than any other country. That’s the truth, but we have by far the highest death toll in absolute terms, and I estimate that sometime in June we’ll surpass Italy in per capita deaths as well (see the numbers below). But Dr. Fauci said a couple weeks ago that “Testing isn’t everything”, which is roughly the equivalent of saying “Breathing is greatly overrated. It isn’t everything – you need food, water, etc.” Testing literally is everything, given the situation we’re in now, and it was very disheartening to hear him say this.

Third, Trump seems to be having success in getting you (or at least Dr. Fauci) to buy into his latest idea that the US will develop a vaccine by the end of the year and have it ready for use, as long as we pour many hundreds of billions into building the infrastructure needed to develop several competing candidates, long before they’re even tested. That this is probably a good idea – as Dr. Fauci said a couple days ago – just shows how desperate our situation is. But it’s very possible that all of our investment will yield a return of $0.00. Every other major country is also racing to develop a vaccine, so it’s much more likely that one of them will develop it than we do, simply because of the numbers. Dr. Fauci, you’re going to look like an idiot – again – for going along with this. You previously said a vaccine can’t be developed, tested and approved – let alone manufactured in the quantities necessary – in anything less than 18 months. Did the science suddenly change or did you succumb to Trump’s pressure when you touted the vaccine idea. Say it ain’t so, Tony!

It wouldn’t be so bad if we were just going to waste a half trillion or so on this scheme. What’s terrible is that it will become Trump’s main excuse for not getting everything else done that needs to be done. Like testing (have I mentioned that before?).

Perhaps the biggest danger now is that we won’t be at all prepared for the new wave of infections that is likely to happen in the fall, since that is the prediction of some well-respected epidemiologists in a study released last week (which I wrote about in this post over the weekend) – as well as waves that are very likely to come in the next couple years, since that has been the pattern of every epidemic to hit the US, that they’ve been able to analyze. Dr. Fauci agreed that we’ll be hit this fall a couple days ago, but Trump has made it very clear that he’s not even going to even consider this possibility (and he literally tried to make the head of the CDC take back that prediction last week at a press conference. Fortunately, he refused to do that).

So we’ll probably do the same thing that we did with the first wave – wait until it’s upon us, then stumble around trying – half-heartedly of course – to do a lot of things we should have done much earlier, and blaming China, Barack Obama, and life in general for being so cruel.

Good Doctors, nothing is going to improve unless someone else is brought in to be in charge of the whole coronavirus response, leaving Trump and Pence to sit on the sidelines and maybe make handwashing videos. The only way that can happen is if both of you quit and educate the American people on how dire our situation is, rather than trying to pretend that, with just a little more effort, we may beat this thing. We can beat this thing, but it’s going to take a huge amount of effort, and more importantly that effort can’t be continually undercut by the guy in charge of it.

The numbers

I track three numbers. One (total cases) I consider essentially meaningless now. Another, deaths as a percentage of closed cases, is moving in the right direction, but its rate of decline has slowed considerably over the past week – and it’s still far too high, compared to what it should be. Most importantly, the third number, total deaths, looks like it may be in a downward trend – as opposed to being stuck around 2,000 per day, as they have been for a few weeks.

So you’ll notice the projected numbers of deaths are much lower than just two days ago. But you have to consider three important things:

1. Even though my projected numbers dropped a lot, we’ll still average 2,300 deaths every day in May, and 4,700 every day in June.
2. The death figures are a serious undercount of total deaths due to the pandemic; this can be measured by comparing the number of deaths in March and April with what would normally be expected based on previous years. A study at Yale estimated that, during the period of March 1 through April 4, there were over 15,000 such “excess” deaths, only 8,000 of which had been reported as Covid-19 deaths. So our current 68,000 deaths total is quite definitely an undercount, perhaps by a factor of 1.5 or 2. One reason for this: People experiencing heart problems aren’t going to the hospital until they become very serious, because they figure their chance of acquiring Covid-19 is much higher in a hospital. A large number of them are dying because of that decision.
3. Most concerning, as I discussed in my post on Saturday, unless we get the coronavirus totally under control before we open up widely, we’re guaranteed to have 2-3 years of outbreaks. In fact, this fall’s outbreak might be much more severe than the one we’re in now.

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 7%. Note I stopped reporting percent change in weekly deaths, since that number is meaningless when you simply project deaths using the current rate, as I’m doing.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Pct. Change from previous month
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5
March 21	244	35
March 28	1,928	275
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889
April 11	12,126	1,732
April 18	18,434	2,633
April 25	15,251	2,179
Month of April	59,812	1,994	1,474%
May 2	13,183	1,883
May 9	11,717	1,674
May 16	14,914	2,131
May 23	17,225	2,461
May 30	19,336	2,762
Month of May	70,678	2,280	118%
June 6	24,611	3,516
June 13	28,425	4,061
June 20	31,909	4,558
June 27	40,614	5,802
Month of June	140,655	4,688	199%
Total March - June	275,203

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 68,609

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,161 (vs. 1,666 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 2% (vs. 3% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 7% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. It was 9% yesterday)

II. Total reported cases

I no longer pay any attention to the reported case number. It is a huge underestimate of actual cases, which is probably 25-50 times reported. This is because of the huge shortage of testing capacity. If reported cases were to be anywhere near actual cases, we would need to be doing 20-30 million tests a week. I believe the US has done about 6 million tests since the start of the pandemic.

Total US reported cases: 1,189,024

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 27,915

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 3 days previous: 9%

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 178,671

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 68,609

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 28% (vs. 28% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 28% of them have resulted in death. Compare this with the comparable number from South Korea, which is 3%. The main reason this number is so high is that total recoveries are so low. I’ve been assuming since March 26, when the recoveries number was first published, that it would rise, so that the number above (which was 41% on March 26), would be far lower than it is now. If this number really stays at 28%, this means the actual case mortality rate in the US is very high, comparable with say Italy.