Guaranteed failure, part IV

I’ve done three posts on Guaranteed failure, meaning that the administration’s “programs” (for want of a better word) in these three areas are all completely self-defeating, yet the administration persists in them,  wasting lots of taxpayer dollars - and most importantly, wasting precious time. They’re not only not fixing the underlying problems, but they’re taking actions that are guaranteed to make them worse.

The first post discussed the push to develop a vaccine, while at the same time waging a campaign to discredit Dr. Fauci and others who will need to sell people on the idea of being vaccinated. As I pointed out, the very rush to develop the vaccine will make a lot of people very skeptical about being vaccinated.

The second post discussed schools, where the push to reopen schools at full strength without waiting for all the needed protections to be put in place – vs. a sensible approach where you start with something less than full reopening in almost all places, and then work up to full strength if that’s successful – guarantees that schools will almost all be completely virtual a month after opening, since just a handful of cases will shut almost every one of them down.

The third post discussed fighting the virus itself, where Trump’s lack of support, or outright opposition, to the policies and programs that are needed to fight the virus guarantees that we won’t get out of this situation anytime soon – meaning neither the economy nor the schools are likely to be able to fully reopen by the end of next year, and certainly not this year.

But I’d say the most serious problem, in terms of human health, is the fact that, not only do we not have the novel coronavirus under control now, but there’s now the possibility of a major catastrophe in the fall, for two reasons:

1.      As it gets colder, people will be indoors more, and more prone to spread the virus to others. This is in some way the mirror image of what happened in Southern states this summer, where the heat drove people indoors for air conditioning. This is why the seasonal flu always surges in the fall (along with the cold itself, although the coronavirus doesn’t seem to pay much attention to hot and cold temperatures. It surged in March and it’s surging now in July)

2.      Because the seasonal flu will surge and people will be hospitalized (with some deaths) as they are every year, hospital capacity will be much more limited in the fall. So if the novel coronavirus were to resurge in the fall (as a number of scientists, including Dr. Redfield of the CDC, predicted in April. And as the flu virus did in 1918, to a much higher level than the first wave in the spring of that year), we could fairly easily have people dying in hallways again, as they did in New York City in April.

So we need to do massive mask wearing, testing, contact tracing and isolation of cases not only to get the virus under control, but to “flatten the curve” to avoid this fall wave. In March and April, there was no option at all for massive testing and contact tracing, since we were way behind on both of those; we had to lock down. And guess what? Even though we’re doing over 600,000 tests a day now (vs. about 3,000 a day at the beginning of February), we’re still way behind – and the fact that results often take more than a week to come back makes the tests useless for containing the virus. It’s very possible a large or even total lockdown will be required in the US, if we once again let the coronavirus prevail where common sense could have saved us.

Someone who understood this would be pounding on the table and screaming to get these things done. Unfortunately, the current president is still doing his best to undermine all of these, including still not wearing a mask even though his lips moved enough recently for the admonition to wear a mask to come through them once. This was hailed as an historic achievement by his supporters). And he opposes any more money for testing, contact tracing, or the CDC. And of course, he’s still doing his best to undermine the experts like Dr. Fauci and the CDC. Plus he continues to say that the virus will disappear as if by magic – he just has to keep moving the date back.

Maybe we’ll be fantastically lucky this fall. We’d better – at the moment that’s the only thing that will save us.

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	6,143	878
Month of July	24,420	788	102%
August 1	6,407	915
August 8	6,682	955
August 15	6,970	996
August 22	7,269	1,038
August 29	7,528	1,083
Month of August	30,656	989	126%
Total March – August	185,198

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 146,192

Deaths reported yesterday: 1,234

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: 4,101,308

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 72,575

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 13%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 1,943,503

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 146,192

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