The picture bleakens (is that a word?)

  

Note on May 6: The email feed didn’t work from April 26 through yesterday. You should have it now, but let me know if you’re not getting the emails (one should have come yesterday). I posted every day during that period. You can see all of the posts at https://thepandemicblog.blogspot.com/.

I’ve seen it written a few times that the novel coronavirus is very different from flu viruses in that it rarely mutates. Well, that idea seems to be out the window now. Researchers at Los Alamos National Labs (you know, the place where they developed the atomic bomb) have identified at least 14 mutations, including one that seems to be much more infectious than the current version.

The new strain is rapidly replacing the old one in some areas, and may at some point account for most of the Covid-19 cases worldwide. There are some big problems due to this, including:

1. Even though the new strain may not be any more deadly in itself than the current one, the fact that it can infect so many more people will mean more deaths.
2. A vaccine might be developed, but be ineffective because it targets the old strain, not the new one. This is why there’s no “one-and-done” flu vaccine – you have to have a new vaccine every year, which is based on scientists’ educated guess early in the year of what the dominant strain might be in the fall.
3. People who have been infected with the current strain might not have any immunity to the new strain, so the idea that there will be some sort of “immunity passport” is certainly nothing we should count on at this point.
4. The idea of herd immunity becomes even less tenable than it is, if someone who has had the original strain doesn’t have immunity to the new one. And even the idea that we’ll be protected when the whole country has been infected goes out the window. This means that Sweden’s current misguided attempt to leave the economy mostly open – even bars! I guess they consider them essential in Sweden – and just take some increased deaths looks even more like a real mistake. Of course, that was the UK’s original idea, and even though they abandoned it more than a month ago, yesterday they passed Italy in total coronavirus deaths in Europe.

So I don’t quite agree with Mr. Trump’s idea that the US doesn’t need a pandemic task force any more, since we’re just going to focus on opening up the economy – even though very few states actually meet the criteria for reopening that Trump and the task force announced 3 or so weeks ago. The worst part of it is that his strategy is guaranteed not to work. Polls show that a big majority of Americans don’t feel it’s safe to reopen the economy, meaning that they won’t go to work or go shopping, whether or not they’re allowed to. It will just mean we’re spending another month or two not doing anywhere near what we should be doing to defeat the virus, while it continues to spread and embed itself everywhere (and this also means we’re definitely going to have a fall wave, which will perhaps be larger than the current one).

If the prerequisites for reopening were really in place, including widespread capability for testing (probably 2-3 million tests per day, since many people won’t come back to work until everybody in their office or factory is being tested at least once a week, if not more often than that. And a lot of people won’t walk into a store or restaurant that doesn’t advertise that all of their employees have been recently tested), then we could talk about it. As it is, Trump’s reopening task force will inevitably be disbanded in a month or two, as deaths continue on their merry way (see the numbers below. BTW, a projection used by FEMA has 3 thousand deaths per day in early June, which is almost exactly my current projection). And maybe we’ll then have Pandemic Task Force II, although I’m sure the WH will find a more creative name for it.

Note from Tom: I just saw an article in the Washington Post that points out this study hasn't been peer reviewed yet, and some scientists were skeptical of 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 3-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 7%.

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	11,354	1,622
May 16	13,444	1,921
May 23	17,281	2,469
May 30	18,438	2,634
Month of May	66,549	2,147	111%
June 6	21,831	3,119
June 13	28,062	4,009
June 20	29,941	4,277
June 27	35,451	5,064
Month of June	130,277	4,343	196%
Total March - June	260,696

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 72,285

Increase in deaths since previous day: 2,360 (vs. 1,316 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 3% (vs. 2% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 7% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. It was 6% 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: 1,238,083

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 29,766

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 3 days previous: 7%

III. Reported case mortality rate so far in the pandemic in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 201,011

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 72,285

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 26% (vs. 27% 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.

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