Can you say “debacle”?

Note from Tom: I made the mistake of putting this post up before the email feed of Tuesday's post came out, meaning that if you read this post in the email feed, this is the second time you've received it, and you never received Tuesday's post. You can read that one here.

President Trump’s planned campaign rally in Tulsa is shaping up to be at best a disappointment for Trump, and at worst a debacle that will serve as a shining advertisement for his incompetence and disregard for the well-being and even lives of his supporters, let alone the rest of the population.

The big problem is of course that he’s planning on holding an indoor rally. The rally could be done fairly safely if a) it were outdoors, b) all attendees (including Trump and Pence, who will also be there) are required to wear masks, and c) attendees are seated six feet apart, unless they’re next to someone they live with. However, it’s close to certain that none of these precautions will be taken (and even if the latter two were taken, they would be almost moot if the event remains indoors).

Hand sanitizer and masks will be given out and temperatures will be checked at the door (although it’s just about certain that nobody will wear a mask, since Trump has turned not wearing one into the equivalent of a loyalty test), but otherwise the primary precaution that will be taken is that all attendees will have to agree online not to sue Trump’s re-election committee if they contract Covid-19. This, combined with the fact that it’s certain that Trump, Pence and their whole entourage will be tested for Covid-19 both before and after the rally, means that the only attendees guaranteed not to suffer in any way from any untoward consequences of the rally are those two gentlemen (although my guess is that, if a lot of people contract coronavirus, the waiver – which doesn’t bother to point out that the director of the Tulsa health department and numerous health care professionals, including a large group of Oklahoma doctors and nurses, say this rally shouldn’t be held indoors, period – won’t hold up in court).

And of course, this is the whole problem: Trump is putting the health and even lives of his supporters at serious risk, and for what? Oklahoma is one of the last states that he has to worry about in November. He’s presumably assuming that this rally will show his supporters across the country that he’s very much alive and in the race for November, despite the increasingly dismal poll numbers. And it might do that if nobody gets sick.

But if attendees do get sick, and especially if a lot of them do, Trump might as well change his campaign slogan to “Just vote for me in November, then I’ll be fine (health-wise and economically). If you happen to die of Covid-19 the next day, that’s too bad – I’ll be sure to find some time to feel sorry for you.” This doesn’t strike me as a winning slogan.


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 the projected numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 4%.

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 significant intervening changes.

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
1,474%
May 2
13,183
1,883

May 9
12,592
1,799

May 16
10,073
1,439

May 23
8,570
1,224

May 30
6,874
982

Month of May
42,327
1,365
71%
June 6
6,544
935

June 13
5,427
775

June 20
5,133
733

June 27
5,357
765

Month of June
23,582
786
56%
July 4
 5,591
 799

July 11
 5,836
834

July 18
 6,090
870

July 25
 6,356
908

Month of July
 27,828
 898
118%
Total March – July
157,607


Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths
Total US deaths as of yesterday: 119,145
Increase in deaths since previous day: 859
Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 4% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above; it was 5% yesterday. There is a 7-day cycle in the reported deaths numbers, 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 three-day percent increase I used to focus on, and certainly not the one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases
Total US reported cases: 2,208,707
Increase in reported cases since previous day: 25,667
Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 1%
Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 8%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:
Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 903,136
Total Deaths as of yesterday: 119,145
Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 12% (vs. 12% yesterday)
For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post.


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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more

The Indian variant

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week). This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot o...
Read more

More than ever, we’re on our own

Leana Wen, a physician and former public health commissioner for Baltimore, wrote another great op-ed piece for the Post today entitled “We’ve reached 200,000 deaths. Our response has gotten even worse than it was at 100,000.” It makes the stark point: By the most important measures of public health, we’re doing worse on a national scale than we were in late May, when the US passed 100,000 Covid deaths. Here are some of her points: “In late May, we had about 20,000 new infections per day. Now we are at double that, with  around 40,000  new daily infections. This is a high baseline to have entering the fall and winter, when the combination of quarantine fatigue and cold weather could drive people to congregate indoors and substantially increase transmission.” “In addition, restrictions keep getting lifted, even in states with surging infections. The nearly 2  million  students returning for in-person instruction will surely lead to more outbreaks, as some colleg...
Read more