It’s all about the kids!
What are the two biggest obstacles to completely
reopening the economy? That’s easy:
- Workers are
worried they’ll catch Covid-19 if they return to work; and
- Parents with
school-age children can’t return to work until the schools reopen.
These might seem like separate
reasons, but in the end, I contend they both come down to one very simple
truth: Parents are much more concerned about their children getting sick than
they are about themselves. This means that:
- Adults who
don’t have children at home are probably much more willing to return to
work than those who do, simply because the latter are very afraid that
they’ll get sick at work – asymptomatically – and come home to spread Covid-19
to their children; and
- The schools
can’t reopen until parents are willing to send their children back to
them. However, I read this morning that a striking 60% of parents will
consider home-schooling options if their kids’ school reopens in the fall.
Of course, this means these parents won’t be available to work in a job
outside the home.
Again: To fix the economy, we need to
first fix the virus. And if we don’t fix the virus, we’ll never fix the
economy.
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 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19
deaths, which was 8%.
Note
that the “accuracy” of the projected numbers diminishes greatly after 3-4
weeks. This is because, up until 3-4 weeks, deaths could in theory be predicted
very accurately, if one knew the real number of cases. In other words, the
people who are going to die in the next 3-4 weeks of Covid-19 are already sick
with the disease, even though they may not know it yet. But this means that the
trend in deaths should be some indicator of the level of infection 3-4 weeks
previous.
However,
once we get beyond 3-4 weeks, deaths become more and more dependent on policies
and practices that are put in place – or removed, as is more the case nowadays
- after today (as well as other factors like the widespread availability of an
effective treatment, if not a real “cure”). Yet I still think there’s value in
just trending out the current rate of increase in deaths, since it gives some
indication of what will happen in the near term if there are no intervening
changes.
However,
it’s 100% certain that deaths won’t stop at the end of June! They might decline
some more this summer, but Drs. Redfield (CDC head) and Fauci both predict
there will be a new wave of the virus in the fall, and one noted study
said there was a good probability the fall wave would be greater than the one
we’re in now, as happened in the 1918 pandemic.
Week ending
|
Deaths reported during week/month
|
Avg. deaths per day during week/month
|
Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
|
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 death every 44 seconds)
|
1,474%
|
May 2
|
13,183
|
1,883
|
|
May 9
|
12,592
|
1,799
|
|
May 16
|
10,073
|
1,439
|
|
May 23
|
8,570
|
1,224
|
|
May 30
|
7,454
|
1,065
|
|
Month of May
|
42,930
|
1,385 (=1 death every 62 seconds)
|
72%
|
June 6
|
8,017
|
1,145
|
|
June 13
|
8,623
|
1,232
|
|
June 20
|
9,274
|
1,325
|
|
June 27
|
9,975
|
1,425
|
|
Month of June
|
38,020
|
1,267 (= 1 death every 68 seconds)
|
89%
|
Total March - June
|
144,820
|
|
|
Red = projected numbers
I. Total
deaths
Total US deaths as of yesterday: 100,625
Increase in deaths since previous day: 716 (vs. 609 yesterday)
Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 1% (this number
was 1% yesterday)
Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 8% (This number
is used to project deaths in the table above – it was 19% yesterday. There is a
7-day cycle in deaths, caused by lack of reporting over the weekends from
closed state offices. So this is the only reliable indicator of a trend in
deaths, not the one-day percent increase I used to focus on).
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 at least 5-10 times what’s reported. This is because of the
huge shortage of testing capacity. For reported cases to be anywhere near
actual cases, we would need to be doing millions of tests a day. I believe the
US has done fewer than 7 million tests since the start of the pandemic.
Total US reported cases: 1,725,900
Increase in reported cases since previous day: 16,512
Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 1%
Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 10%
III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far
in the US:
Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 479,973
Total Deaths as of yesterday: 100,625
Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases
(=deaths + recoveries): 17% (vs. 18% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of
all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 17% of them
have resulted in death. Compare this with the comparable number from South
Korea, which is below 3%. China’s is 6%. The reason this number is so high is
that total reported recoveries are so low. I’ve been assuming since March 26,
when the recoveries number was first published, that it would rise, so that this
percentage (which was 41% on March 26), would be far lower than it is now. It
still has to drop a lot, but it currently seems to be making some progress.
Hopefully it will be down to at most 6% in the near future.
I would love to hear any comments or
questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com
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