White House supports massive workplace testing!

  

My death projections went up for the second day, after falling for a few days. A very odd fact, that I discovered yesterday but have no explanation for, is that there’s a regular 7- or 8-day cycle in the percent change in total deaths, which has been going on since mid-March. The last peak was 12% on April 30. Today it was up to 10%, so it will be interesting to see which way it moves tomorrow. Since the peaks have been falling since reaching 159% on March 24, it would be nice to think that trend will continue and the rate will fall tomorrow – but if you want someone who’s going to replace facts with wishful thinking, you’ve come to the wrong blog.

As I’ve said many times, my projections below are just that – projections of total deaths, based on the 3-day rate of growth in that number. It would be nice to actually forecast deaths by multiplying total cases by an estimate of the case mortality rate. However, there is no good estimate for total cases. The reported number is 1.3 million, but because of the severe shortage of testing capability that number is around 1/10 to 1/50 of the actual total, based on some other evidence of the number of people infected.

And yesterday’s “hard” estimate of the case mortality rate – 26%, as shown at the bottom of this post – is certainly very high. If we were to multiply reported cases by this estimated rate, we would expect total deaths over the pandemic to be 26 million, and that’s only if there were no new cases starting today. Even I think this is really farfetched, but the fact is that I’ve been expecting this number to come down to well under 10% very quickly, and it’s only moved down from 41% on March 26, when it first became available.

This – combined with the fact that the risks in my projections are all on the upside, as states open up even when they still have growing cases and deaths, and when they still have inadequate testing capability – makes it hard to believe the numbers below, severe as they are, aren’t underestimates, not overestimates.

Speaking of tests, there was one piece of good news yesterday: The White House now admits that much more testing capability will be needed before people will want to go back to work. As you probably know (or should know), the vast majority of Americans now think the current lockdowns need to be extended, not lifted. They say this because they don’t trust any workplace to be safe – no matter what special social distancing measures are put in place – as long as someone with Covid-19, but no symptoms, is walking around the office or factory. Ideally, you would want to test every worker every day when they come to work (or perhaps before).

Trump and his staff (and some state governors, and Wall Street Journal editorial writers, and many others of their ilk) have been pooh-poohing this idea, saying we won’t need anywhere near that level of testing before people will feel safe to return to work. But yesterday, they announced that they have set up a model workplace to test this idea: the White House itself! Because a butler just tested positive for Covid-19, the WH was quick to point out that Mr. Trump and a lot of his staff are definitely virus-free, since they get tested every day (using one of the Abbott Labs 15-minute testing kits, which are very hard to get, but someone there seems to have some connections).

Of course, we were all very glad to hear that Mr. Trump is safe, and I would like to modestly suggest that this model needs to be extended to the whole country. Mr. Trump should boldly announce that, within say one month, all workers in all workplaces will be tested daily. And of course, if they are found to be sick, they’ll all be sent home on paid sick leave (and they will be encouraged to move into a hotel – paid for by the government, of course – to protect the other people in their household). And all of their contacts will be traced (you can be sure that all of the butler’s contacts will be traced!) and tested. Moreover, any contacts testing positive will themselves be isolated, etc. etc.

Will this be expensive? Absolutely. But this is what’s needed to get the economy reopened; anything much less than this simply isn’t going to work, period – that is, unless the government decides to force people to go back to work by cutting off all of their unemployment benefits and of course their medical care, since Trump reaffirmed his intention to kill off Obamacare entirely a couple days ago. Unfortunately he still hasn’t gotten around to developing his wonderful alternative that will be less expensive, cover everybody with pre-existing conditions, raise the dead, etc. – five or six years after he first promised that. But don’t worry, that’s coming soon, just like the testing is.

So I commend the WH on putting this pilot program in place, and I encourage them to extend it to the whole country. Then, and only then, can we really open up the economy. Any suggestion to the contrary is pure delusion.

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 10%.

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 death every 44 seconds)	1,474%
May 2	13,183	1,883
May 9	14,847	2,121
May 16	20,156	2,879
May 23	25,731	3,676
May 30	32,406	4,629
Month of May	101,287	3,627 (= 1 death every 23 seconds)	148%
June 6	39,331	5,619
June 13	50,210	7,173
June 20	63,235	9,034
June 27	76,750	10,964
Month of June	264,049	8,802 (= 1 death every 10 seconds)	261%
Total March - June	429,206

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 76,928

Increase in deaths since previous day: 2,129 (vs. 2,525 yesterday)

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

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 10% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. It was 9% 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: 1,292,623

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 29,531

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 3 days previous: 5%

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 217,251

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 76,928

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 26% (vs. 26% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 26% 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 this level, 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