Guaranteed failure, part III

As I’ve pointed out in the last two posts, not only is President Trump’s “strategy” in two key areas – vaccine deployment and reopening the schools – deficient, it’s literally guaranteed to fail. A third area is fully reopening the economy. What’s Trump’s strategy for that?

In late March and the beginning of April, there were less than 300,000 cases (vs. just about 4 million today), yet the death numbers were growing rapidly. Daily deaths passed 1,000 for the first time on April 1. This wasn’t the peak, which came when daily deaths were in the 2,000-3,000 range in late April and early May. But what was really horrifying was the rate at which daily deaths were growing. On March 28, the 7-day growth rate in daily deaths was 641%. If this had continued, the entire population of the US would have been dead before May 10.

There was no question the country needed to be locked down, and most states didn’t wait for an order from the Feds – they locked down (to varying degrees) themselves. Trump finally issued “social distancing” guidelines, which were due to expire on April 30. The guidelines included instructions on how a state could decide it could reopen, and by how much.

However, Trump almost immediately started to undercut those, first with his push to reopen churches for Easter, and on April 17 when he tweeted “Liberate Michigan!” in support of “astroturf” protests against lockdowns in Michigan and other states. Since then, he’s been remarkably consistent: Fully opening up the economy is much more important than worrying about the pandemic. So a few states reopened fully in early May, and most others started reopening more gradually. Few states actually adhered to the CDC’s guidelines in deciding what to do and when.

So now we find ourselves in a position where a) new daily deaths have only gradually increased since their low in mid-June, but b) cases are climbing by over 60,000 a day, vs. around 20,000 in early June. As far as the economy goes, the fact that deaths aren’t keeping up with cases doesn’t matter: a lot of people are never going to want to go back to work, and they’ll never send their kids back to school, if new cases aren’t under control in their area.

While some local lockdowns may now be needed in states like Texas and Florida, there’s no need for a national lockdown. But there is a need for the basic stuff we’ve been neglecting all along: mask wearing, massive testing, massive contact tracing, and isolation of infected people (those who would infect their families if they’re quarantined with them). But as you know, Trump isn’t in favor of any of these (although he may be actually now willing to say masks are a good thing, which is a far cry from actively pushing them). He has said he doesn’t want any money at all for testing, contact tracing or the CDC in the new relief bill.

So, unless Trump has a tremendous change of heart – or is forced to by Republican Senators worried about re-election – we’re not going to have a fully reopened economy or reopened schools, period.

Again, guaranteed failure.

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	4,457	637
June 27	6,167	881
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
July 4	4,166	595
July 11	5,087	727
July 18	5,476	782
July 25	5,805	829
Month of July	23,721	765	99%
August 1	6,041	863
August 8	6,287	898
August 15	6,542	935
August 22	6,808	973
August 29	7,084	1,012
Month of August	28,853	931	122%
Total March – August	182,696

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 143,864

Deaths reported yesterday: 575

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 4% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above; it was 4% 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: 3,961,805

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 63,166

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 14%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 1,850,988

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 143,864

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 7%

For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post. Short answer: If this percentage declines, that’s good. It’s been steadily declining since a high of 41% at the end of March. But a good number would be 2%, like South Korea’s. An OK number would be 4%, like China’s.

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