Now the children are in danger!

  

Note on May 5: I realized yesterday that my email feed had been down for about a week. A few people had pointed this out to me, but I thought they must be mistaken (I should have looked in my own inbox!). But I applied a fix this morning, and it seems to have worked. You should have received an email by now, containing the post I put up earlier this morning. Since I've posted every day during the interregnum (I think the last feed was Feb. 26), you can go to https://thepandemicblog.blogspot.com/ to see them, as well as all of my previous posts on this blog.

New deaths yesterday rose by 200, but they’re still far below what seemed to be the trend just a week ago. However, since I base my projections on the 3-day rate of change and that was down the previous two days, my projections have fallen again since yesterday.

But the point is new deaths are still rising – they need to be falling before we can say there’s really light at the end of the tunnel. Even though we’re at “only” about 1400 deaths a day at the moment, even if they stayed at that level this would be unacceptable. Two reasons are:

• I don’t believe the economy can really be restarted in any meaningful way until new deaths are close to zero. As long as people think there is some significant chance that they’ll be infected by the coronavirus when they go to work, they’re not going to want to go. And forcing people to go to work by cutting off their unemployment benefits is hardly the appropriate solution! We need to fix the problem, period.
• Since people over 60 (like me) make up the vast majority of Covid-19 deaths, if we don’t make a serious effort to bring total deaths down, we’re telling them that they’re expendable. I don’t really think that’s what people want.

But here’s by far the most serious reason why we want to get this under control ASAP: Yesterday, New York health officials said 15 children there had recently been hospitalized with a very serious syndrome of unknown cause, which seems to be linked to Covid-19. Almost all of those children had antibodies for Covid-19, indicating they are or were infected. This is very serious: Almost all of those children required blood pressure support, and five are on ventilators. Reports similar to this have been coming out of Europe.

This seems to be a very serious result of the coronavirus being so widespread in our population and Europe’s. As everyone knows, very few children have died so far of Covid-19. Are we going to risk significant child deaths soon – even though they might not be counted in the Covid-19 totals – just because we didn’t want to be bothered to do what’s necessary to stop the coronavirus?

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 3-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 6%. 

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	10,075	1,439
May 16	11,753	1,679
May 23	14,154	2,022
May 30	15,450	2,207
Month of May	57,290	1,848	96%
June 6	18,022	2,575
June 13	21,705	3,101
June 20	23,692	3,385
June 27	27,637	3,948
Month of June	101,999	3,400	178%
Total March - June	223,158

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 69,925

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,316 (vs. 1,161 yesterday)

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

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 6% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. It was 7% 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: 1,260,460

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 31,756

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 3%

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: 188,608

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 69,925

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 27% (vs. 28% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 27% 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 estimated case mortality rate (which was 41% on March 26), would be far lower than it is now. If this number really stays at 27%, this means the actual case mortality rate in the US is very high, comparable with say Italy.