What will finally stop the coronavirus in the US?

  

The numbers

Today’s numbers are once again higher than yesterday’s, because there was a big drop in the new deaths numbers on April 26 and 27 - which hasn’t been sustained. From now on, will the numbers continue to go up, will they plateau or will they go down? The answer to that is yes, the numbers will definitely change in one of those three ways. I certainly don’t know which one will win out, but it’s clear there won’t be much downward pressure on the deaths number from now on, since the effects of the social distancing orders that started in mid-March have now been realized and all of the movement is toward re-opening the economy.

The only real question is how much upward pressure there will be, due to the reopening now occurring. I would initially have been inclined to say this will cause a lot more deaths soon, but that’s tempered by the fact that few big companies of any sort are at all interested in even starting to reopen now – given that they in general don’t want to see a lot of their workers die, and there’s also the not small problem of liability, since they could properly be blamed if a number of workers came back to work, got sick and died.

Remember, in most states it’s likely a worker who doesn’t return when their company reopens will lose their unemployment insurance benefits, meaning they will be forced to return. But this also means that, by opening up, a company (of any size, not just big ones) is exposing itself to the possibility of some huge lawsuits – which might even hit individual owners or managers who made the decision to reopen. There’s no way they can claim that returning to work was a worker’s voluntary decision. This is quite evident from the meatpacking plants. President Trump (ludicrously) deemed them essential for national security (even though about a month ago he didn’t want to do that for ventilator production, supposedly fearing that would infringe on individual liberties), but yesterday a huge plant in Indiana closed because of a big jump in new cases among the workers, and my guess is most meat processing plants will be closed very soon, pending a complete redesign for the new age of distancing.

So if the opening up is limited to a few beauty parlors and restaurants – and any owner of an establishment, who has access to good legal advice, will certainly not reopen without putting very strict limits on how many people can be inside at one time, how far apart they can be, etc. – there may well not be a lot of upward pressure on new deaths for the moment.

Based on this idea (and also the statement from a prominent virologist that we can expect a plateau in deaths for the foreseeable future – although he made that statement to counter people who think that deaths will soon start to decline, for some unknown scientific reason), I decided to rerun my daily projections of deaths. This new projection isn’t based on the three-day growth rate in total deaths, which is what the numbers below are based on. Instead, I noticed that the new deaths number hasn’t shown a trend in either direction since before April 15. I took the average daily deaths since then – which is 2,128 - and based my numbers on the idea that this will be the number of daily new deaths going forward (of course, this means that the rate of increase falls, since the denominator of that fraction keeps growing while the numerator doesn’t).

Here are the most important results of doing that:

1. Total new deaths in May are about 66,000.
2. Total new deaths in June are about 64,000 (because there’s one fewer day in June).
3. Total deaths from March to June are 194,000 (vs. 695,000 in the table below).

But here’s the big point: No matter what you assume about how deaths will continue to grow through June, there’s no reason at all to believe that rate won’t continue in coming months until…well, until what? There are really only four possibilities that I can see (plus a few outliers that are based on speculation, like that an existing vaccine for polio might block Covid-19):

1.       The US will miraculously develop the testing and contact tracing capabilities needed to get the virus under control, in the way all countries who have beaten the virus have done it – identifying everyone who is sick, even if they’re asymptomatic, quarantining them, then tracing all of their significant contacts and quarantining them. This would require 4-6 million tests a day (vs. around 6 million total that we’ve conducted since the beginning of the pandemic), and up to 300,000 contract tracers. This is definitely doable, but it would of course require a lot of money, and it would also require going back into lockdown for another month in the states that are itching to open up. If we’d had this capability in March when the lockdowns began – and it would have been much less expensive then, of course – we could be reopening with confidence now. We could handle the expense now (especially given the alternative courses of action, like number 3 below, which will be more expensive and aren’t at all certain to work), but going back into lockdown mode is probably politically impossible at the moment.

2.       A miracle cure will be found and given to every Covid-19 patient. This won’t affect the number of cases at all, but it would presumably bring down the death rate dramatically. Saint Anthony Fauci announced a couple days ago that remdesivir had been tested and found to help some percentage of patients – although it didn’t seem terribly dramatic and it certainly isn’t a “cure”. More importantly, the study hasn’t been peer reviewed, meaning the results could possibly be found to be statistically insignificant. Hold the champagne on this one.

3.       A new vaccine will be developed, tested and found to work, and produced in quantities large enough to inoculate almost every American of any age. President Trump has seized on the idea of a) identifying some small number of promising vaccines being tested now; and b) paying each of their developers to build up the production capacity needed to produce 300 million vaccines (or maybe 600 million, if two doses are required for every person), as well as buy now the huge number of syringes, vials, etc. that will be required to administer it. He seems to have sold Dr. Fauci on the idea (who’s very anxious to make up for the fact that he didn’t make a lot of noise in early February when the CDC’s initial test didn’t work, and instead of doing something like buying the WHO’s test, which worked and was widely available, the government didn’t then, and still doesn’t have, anywhere near the amount of testing capacity that’s required). I agree this is needed now since we’re in a real bind, but there’s a very real possibility that none of the “promising” vaccines will keep their promise, and our entire investment will yield exactly $0.00 in benefits. In fact, there’s no reason to believe a vaccine will ever be available, since there’s still no HIV vaccine 40 years after AIDS appeared.

4.       Here’s the option we’ll most likely take: We’ll continue to implement some half measures to keep the virus’ growth down, and they’ll continue to yield the expected poor results. Some parts of the economy will be able to keep partially open; others won’t reopen at all (perhaps including meat packing plants); and we’ll wait until either the whole population is infected (since there’s no certainty that “herd immunity” even applies with this virus) – which means many millions of deaths for sure - or another country develops a vaccine, which we will beg them to share with us.

Of course, we will have to hope that other country isn’t China, given that Trump and the Republicans in Congress seem to have settled on holding China financially responsible for all of our pandemic costs as their winning re-election strategy. As it stands now, if China develops a vaccine first, I think we’ll be the last in line to get it, and we’ll certainly be way behind their own 1.4 billion citizens. As Xi Jinping always says: China first!

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 12%. 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	15,079	2,154
May 9	21,460	3,066
May 16	28,981	4,140
May 23	37,807	5,401
May 30	48,769	6,967
Month of May	151,438	4,885	253%
June 6	65,862	9,409
June 13	85,922	12,275
June 20	110,835	15,834
June 27	149,682	21,383
Month of June	480,335	16,011	317%
Total March - June	695,643

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 63,871

Increase in deaths since previous day: 2,769 (vs. 2,404 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 4% (vs. 4% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 12% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. It was 11% 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: 1,095,304

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 30,567

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 3%

Percent increase in reported cases since 3 days previous: 8%

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 155,737

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 63,871

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 29% (vs. 29% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 29% of them have resulted in death. Compare this with the comparable number from South Korea, which is 3%. Do you think that might have something to do with the fact that they had fewer than 250 deaths, while we had over 55,000 deaths as of April 27?