Mr. Trump: Don’t listen to Mitch! He’s not on your side.

  

Yesterday the House passed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief package that contains provisions that should be widely popular, such as aid for states to prevent at least some layoffs of teachers, firefighters and others (beyond those that have already occurred); another $1200 check for most American adults; and a $200 billion fund for essential workers. Very predictably given his recent statements, Mitch McConnell will clearly not even put it up for a vote in the Senate, and said until this week that he just wants to negotiate on one thing: a shield from liability for businesses from Covid-19 lawsuits, from employees and customers. He (and some other GOP leaders, as well as your own “economists”) believes any more spending poses an unacceptable risk of inflation years down the road. That’s of much more concern to him than helping people and businesses survive the epidemic, so that they can safely re-open once the danger is (mostly) past.

However, Mr. President, I honestly thought you would stick to your initial statements a week or two ago - that you want to provide additional aid for the economy. After all, you can read the unemployment numbers, too! Instead, this week you’ve been pretty much taking Mitch’s line that the House bill is simply a Democratic campaign statement. It definitely is that, but in opposing it you’re doing the Democrats’ job for them: defining the campaign as one between a party whose primary concern is with helping working families and those unable to work, and a party whose primary concern is protecting tax breaks for the very wealthy (and extending them, as was done – to the tune of about $150 billion – without much fanfare in the CARES Act), as well as protecting big businesses from being sued by their workers and customers, while they take minimal action to protect them. Biden won’t have to campaign anymore – you’re doing a great job of that for him!

Mr. Trump, this isn’t exactly a winning strategy for November. I don’t doubt that you’ll hold on to most of your base no matter what, but you’re currently alienating just about everybody else. If you think back to those big rallies you used to have, do you really think those people would have cheered lustily if you said “And if we have a major disease outbreak, I’m going to make sure you don’t have the resources to stay at home to protect yourselves, and you’ll have to go back to an unsafe workplace to support your family. And just to show my gratitude for this, I’ll take away your ability – or perhaps your heirs’ ability – to sue your employer, even if their lack of concern clearly led to your getting sick.”

But of course Mitch McConnell is advocating this strategy. He’s a very savvy political operator, so he must know what he’s doing, right? As I pointed out in my post on Wednesday (which you may have missed. I know you’re busy), he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s decided you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning in November, so he’s pursuing the same strategy he pursued with Obama, as the latter tried to lead the country out of the worst financial crisis since the Depression (although it’s already been dwarfed by the current one).

In 2010, McConnell stated publicly that his job was to make sure Obama was a one-term president. His main vehicle for doing this was to seek to limit government expenditures for things like Social Security and – especially – medical care. Unfortunately for the country, he (and John Boehner, the Speaker of the House at that time) had a fair amount of success in this endeavor, meaning the recovery was much weaker than it should have been (McConnell and Boehner were greatly aided in this effort by Obama himself, who fell for the argument that the real enemy was the deficit, not the unemployment that was raging at the time). McConnell thinks that, since Joe Biden will be the next president, his job is to make sure the economy never completely recovers from the coronavirus, thus making the 2024 presidential run of Kamala Harris, or whoever Biden chooses as his VP this year, much less viable.

Whether or not McConnell’s strategy is the correct one for the GOP, it’s pretty clear it doesn’t leave room for you, Mr. Trump. So why are you playing along with it?

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 13%.

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 Covid-19 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	10,063	1,438
May 23	11,329	1,618
May 30	12,753	1,822
Month of May	51,379	1,657 (= 1 death every 51 seconds)	86%
June 6	14,356	2,051
June 13	16,161	2,309
June 20	18,193	2,599
June 27	20,581	2,926
Month of June	75,881	2,529 (= 1 death every 34 seconds)	148%
Total March - June	191,130

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 88,507

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,595 (vs. 1,715 yesterday)

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

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 13% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above)

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: 1,485,912

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 28,319

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 12%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 327,751

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 88,507

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 21% (vs. 21% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 21% 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. But it still has to drop a long way, in order for the US to have anything less than millions of death over the course of the pandemic – since we seem to have given up on controlling total cases in any meaningful way.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com