Mr. Trump, if you don’t plan to use the government to fight the virus, could we borrow it from you?

Early in the Civil War, after Abraham Lincoln’s first choice for general of the main Union army proved inept, President Lincoln turned to a young, promising general named George McClellan to lead the army. McClellan did a great job of building up the numbers of troops, training them thoroughly, and instilling confidence in them. But having done this, he proceeded to keep the army in place, imagining that the Confederate forces were much larger than they were – and continually demanding even more troops and equipment before he would feel safe attacking the Confederates.

What was McClellan’s concern? He simply didn’t want to be responsible for a big Union loss, since he knew the South had much better generals than the North did (and certainly much better than he later proved to be). Lincoln finally became exasperated, sending McClellan a telegram asking “"If General McClellan does not want to use the Army, I would like to borrow it for a time, provided I could see how it could be made to do something."

Of course, the US is engaged in a war with a potentially much more deadly enemy now. We have tremendous resources available, and were identified as the country most prepared to deal with a pandemic by Johns Hopkins in 2019. However, as we all know, we have had the worst response to the novel coronavirus in the world, in terms of deaths and cases (although the UK has had more deaths on a per capita basis), and we’re responsible for about a quarter of both cases and deaths worldwide. Now we’re having a frightening resurgence of cases (and sooner or later deaths).

So where’s our coronavirus “army” now? They’re not sitting in camps, but they’re obviously not being very effective, since more than half of states now have increasing cases, with several of them growing at truly alarming rates. Where’s their “general” now?

Trump has moved into full re-election mode, and decided – wrongly, to be sure – that the best way to get re-elected is to pretend that the virus has already been beaten and the only thing left to do is reopen exactly like we were before. This has led him not only to completely lose interest in the virus response (last week’s briefing by his task force was the first in two months, and he didn’t even attend. He has yet to determine a nationwide testing strategy, other than to continually deny there’s a problem and leave it to the states – so there were 6-hour lines for testing in Florida yesterday), but to actively oppose it in both real ways (e.g. closing 13 testing sites last week, including seven in Texas, of all places) and symbolic ways (refusing to wear a mask and discouraging people around him from doing so. Persisting in the idea of holding more rallies and an indoor convention in August, even though the Tulsa rally showed that even his diehard supporters aren’t quite ready to sacrifice their lives to feed his desire for a huge noisy crowd. And my “favorite” – if you want to call it that – is the fact that his campaign took off the social distancing stickers that had been placed on every other seat in the arena in Tulsa, since he loves the pictures of close-packed, screaming crowds).

In other words, the government would be much more effective against the virus if it were being led by someone who really believed there is a problem, and who is committed to doing something about it, rather than someone who, like McClellan, is laser-focused on avoiding any responsibility for what happens. Trying to remove Trump now (through impeachment or the 25^th Amendment) is obviously the wrong approach, but we do have another branch of the government that could take matters into its own hands – Congress. They of course couldn’t – and shouldn’t – recreate the executive branch “army” that’s already in place. But they could mandate a new approach, and hopefully designate people to carry it out in place of Trump’s team, half of which are incompetent and the other actively opposed to doing the right thing.

The Washington Post published a good op-ed today about how the Republicans in Congress (working with the Democrats, of course) could put together a program for doing what needs to be done now, which isn’t complicated at all: massive testing, massive contact tracing, and universal mask wearing. What the piece doesn’t discuss is how this might be done politically. I think it could be done, but it’s going to depend almost entirely on one man finally deciding to do the right thing. His initials are MM. More on this (I hope) tomorrow.

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 5%.

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	4,457	637
June 27	6,167	881
Month of June	23,529	784	56%
July 4	6,488	927
July 11	6,816	974
July 18	7,161	1,023
July 25	7,524	1,075
Month of July	33,675	1,086	143%
Total March – July	163,401

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 128,438

Increase in deaths since previous day: 286

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 5% (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: 2,637,180

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 40,409

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 12%

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 1,093,527

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 128,438

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 11% (vs. 11% 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