The long slide downward

  

I’m very glad that I moved from making my projections using the most recent 3-day rate of growth in deaths to the most recent 7-day rate. That significantly reduced the day-to-day variability, which Royce Howland pointed out to me recently was likely the result of many reporting locations being closed over the we­ekend. The 7-day rate smooths this out.

The 7-day rate has declined almost continuously since it reached a high of 641% on March 28. A week ago, it was 13%; yesterday it was 11%. Great progress, you say? Only in the sense that, if the rate had stayed at 641%, the entire US population would have been dead by May 9. Instead, lockdowns (of varying degrees) were put in place in almost all states (most were in place by March 28, but none had been in place long enough to have any effect on the deaths numbers), with the result that we’re now at 11%.

But here’s a good example of what exponential growth means: On March 28, new deaths were 533 and total deaths so far were 2,229 – that was at 641% growth. Yesterday, at 11% growth, there were 1,415 new deaths, and the total so far was 96,363. I submit that the families of those 1,415 people aren’t taking any comfort from the fact that the growth rate in deaths is so much lower now than on March 28.

Most importantly, the deaths numbers seem to have stalled, even though the rate of increase continues to decline (very slowly, of course. The rate of decline – the third derivative - is itself slowing). Of course, this is because the base number (which grew by 1% yesterday) is growing, which offsets the slow decline in the rate of increase. In other words, if the rate of increase has slowed by 1%, but the total deaths number has increased by 1%, the daily deaths number won’t change (I didn’t work this out in numbers, so I might be a little off. The principle should be clear, though).

The average daily deaths for the week ending last Saturday were 1,439. For the previous week, they were 1,799, or about 350 more. That’s a pretty good decline in daily deaths. However, if we keep at the current 11% 7-day growth rate, this week’s average will be 1,400, which is just 39 less than last week. For the week ending May 30, I’m projecting 1,552, or an increase of 152. Of course, that’s because of the increase in the base, and the fact that I’m keeping the 11% growth rate constant – not lowering it any more.

Indeed, as the country opens up, it’s far more likely that the growth rate will increase rather than decrease, so the numbers in the chart below are more likely to be too low, rather than too high.

Speaking of opening up, there was a good lesson from the big Ford plant in suburban Chicago, which opened up – with lots of protections in place, and with reduced output from previously – on Monday. In the three days since then, they’ve had one day when they had to shut down after starting (because a worker, who didn’t have a fever in the morning, felt sick later in the day and then tested positive for Covid-19), and another (yesterday) when they had to shut down because an important supplier in Indiana had to shut down.

The moral of both these stories (the story of deaths not falling much if at all, and the story of the Ford plant having a lot of problems coming back into regular – even if far from “normal” – operations) is that, until we have the virus under control, and until deaths are far fewer than 1,500 a day, or even 200 a day, the idea that we’ll be able to return the country to anything approaching a normally functioning economy is pure fantasy.

As many financial people said at the beginning of the crisis, you can’t fix the economy before you fix the virus. We seem to be giving up on fixing the virus. Unfortunately, that means we’re also giving up on fixing the economy, period. Until a vaccine is found (if it’s found and actually works as hoped), we’re consigning the US to a long slide into third-world status.

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 11%.

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	9,799	1,400
May 30	10,865	1,552
Month of May	47,972	1,547(= 1 death every 56 seconds)	80%
June 6	12,046	1,721
June 13	13,356	1,908
June 20	14,808	2,115
June 27	16,419	2,346
Month of June	61,963	2,065 (= 1 death every 42 seconds)	129%
Total March - June	173,805

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 96,363

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,415 (vs. 1,390 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 1% (this number was  1% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 11% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above – it was 11% 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: 1,621,333

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 28,036

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 11%

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 382,244

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 96,363

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 20% (vs. 20% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 20% 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