It’s all about the kids!



What are the two biggest obstacles to completely reopening the economy? That’s easy:

  1. Workers are worried they’ll catch Covid-19 if they return to work; and
  2. 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:

  1. 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
  2. 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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