Which poses the greater threat to the US: a) the novel coronavirus, or b) Dr. Susan Birx? Hmm, that’s a tough one…

Dr. Birx, you may remember I recently said that both you and Dr. Fauci should resign. Inexplicably, neither of you did that. And now I’m withdrawing that recommendation for Dr. Fauci, since president Trump is no longer trying to misrepresent what he says to support what he believes to be the truth, facts be damned – he’s imply ignoring whatever Fauci says. Since it’s clear to the public that he doesn’t agree with the administration’s current “response” efforts, the fact that the institute Dr. Fauci heads is playing a big role in funding the vaccine development effort means he’s probably doing more good than harm currently.

However, your case is different from Dr. Fauci’s. Instead of allowing your words to be misrepresented and allowing Trump to insult you, as Dr. Fauci has done, you’ve joined in with him in some of his worst campaigns to distort the facts:

1. Early on, as the governors were daily clamoring for supplies and especially ventilators, you very helpfully said “There is no shortage of ventilators”.
2. A few weeks later, you joined with Trump and his idiot son-in-law to push the idea that tests were freely available to all who needed them, even as news reports were appearing of people in New Jersey waiting all night in their cars in order to get into a testing station early in the morning, before the station ran out of supplies for the day – and frequently still not getting tested.

However, now you’ve really outdone yourself. Since you’re a smart person, you can certainly see the signs that Trump has decided that, if new infections and new deaths aren’t going to decline to zero on their own, he’ll go with Plan B: Attack the reported number of Covid-19 deaths as grossly overstated. This at a time when it’s quite clear that

1.       The reported number underestimates actual Covid-19 deaths, mostly because many people die, and are still dying, without ever being tested; and

2.       There are many more deaths that are not specifically due to Covid-19, but would not be happening were it not for the pandemic. A big component of these is deaths from heart attacks, which have gone up substantially worldwide due to the fact that so many people, when they first suspect they might have a heart problem, are putting off going to the hospital. They are doing this because they think their chances of acquiring and dying of Covid-19 in the hospital are greater than their chances of dying because of their heart condition (and this is borne out as hospitals worldwide report a huge drop in cardiac cases). Unfortunately, a large number of them are losing this bet.

However, you now seem to agree with Trump that the real problem is that deaths due to the pandemic are overstated, not understated. So you’ve jumped on Dr. Redfield of the CDC because of this, berating him because the deaths numbers aren’t accurate enough for you.

Of course, there certainly are problems with the reported deaths numbers. Anytime you’re trying to aggregate data every day from hundreds of very diverse sources - which have various definitions of what constitutes a Covid-19 death - you’re going to get problems. But what’s the real danger here? Is it that the country will get too scared by the deaths numbers and people will start demonstrating in favor of locking the economy down again?

Of course not. The danger is that states will ignore the reopening guidelines that you and Dr. Fauci provided more than a month ago and open too quickly – leading to more local resurgence of the virus. And as you know, this isn’t a theoretical danger at all. Every state has reopened to some degree, yet no state is currently fully compliant with the guidelines (although some are further out of compliance than others. This is already leading to new flare-ups in states like Alabama, Nebraska and Texas).

Yet you have now drunk the Kool-Aid and decided that our biggest danger is effectively that we’re not reopening fast enough, which will have predictably bad results. Whatever good you’ve done in your current role, just this latest outburst has far outweighed it.

Dr. Birx, maybe you can find a job in some obscure corner of the government where you’ll no longer be seen as in any way speaking for the science community – or better yet, you won’t be speaking period. Or maybe you should just leave the Federal government, and take a job as a contact tracer. I think you would be good at that!

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	10,314	1,473
May 30	11,494	1,642
Month of May	49,127	1,585 (= 1 death every 55 seconds)	82%
June 6	12,810	1,830
June 13	14,276	2,039
June 20	15,910	2,273
June 27	17,730	2,533
Month of June	66,249	2,208 (= 1 death every 39 seconds)	135%
Total March - June	179,245

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 94,948

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,390 (vs. 1,573 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 1% (vs. 2% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 11% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. 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).

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: 1,593,297

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 22,166

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 1%

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: 370,977

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 94,948

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 20% (vs. 21% 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