Paging Dr. McConnell!



Mitch, you need to step up now. You need to do this for your legacy’s sake, for your party’s sake, and – oh, yes! – the sake of your country. We have a man in the White House who, as the number of Covid-19 cases increases wildly, tries to pretend the disease is beaten, and when he can’t do that he says it’s no big deal, all evidence to the contrary. At every moment he undercuts the message sent by his own medical experts, which is in large part responsible for the current situation.

And now it seems that his campaign has decided that the new message is we can “live with” the huge increase in cases – which doesn’t show any sign of slowing down, of course. In other words, we can all live with the increase, unless of course we happen to be one of the unlucky ones who dies. And as I’ve documented in this blog, just being hospitalized with Covid-19 can put you into physical, mental and economic hell for a long time afterwards, where you might question whether it might have been better to have died.

Goldman Sachs (that hotbed of left-wing radicalism!) recently estimated that a universal mask mandate in the US would save the US 5% of GDP, vs. the lockdowns that will probably be inevitable without it. You yourself are now touting the importance of masks, but Trump has a long way to go before he does that. Meanwhile, Texas, Florida and Arizona would greatly benefit from such a mandate now – as well as a number of other states where cases are rapidly increasing. If Trump were to do a 180 and start actively supporting masks, rather than actively undermining their usage, that alone would have a huge impact on people’s health and the economy in general.

Trump (and Pence) also have a long way to go on testing. It’s simply criminal that, after Trump and Pence made assurance after assurance – starting in March or even February – that anyone who needs a test can get one, sick people are sitting in their cars for more than 8 hours in Phoenix, waiting to be tested (while Pence is repeating that everyone who needed a test could get one easily). And two weeks ago, Trump shut down the last 13 federal testing sites, including seven in Texas (not that they need them in Texas now, of course!). Sure we’re doing a lot of tests now, but we need more than ever. And a full reopening is going to require regular testing of probably all workers in offices, stores, restaurants, nursing homes, factories, hospitals, etc.

Mitch, this man is making the situation worse by the day, not better. The time has come for you to sit down with him – face mask and 6 feet separation, of course – and tell him the truth: He’s already destroyed whatever re-election prospects he had, and it’s probably too late for the GOP to maintain control of the Senate in November.

But it’s finally time for both you and him to think about what’s good for the GOP and the country in the long term. Just requiring face masks and solving the testing problem (let’s also throw in solving the contact tracing problem, for good measure) will save many lives, and will allow both you and the GOP – I’m not sure about Trump – to be able to hold your heads up high a year from now and say you did the right thing, better late than never.

The worst part about the current bad news is that we’re not even in the fall yet. I read recently that, in all seven of the flu epidemics that the US has suffered since the 1700s (especially the 1918 pandemic), there was a second wave that was much more devastating (of course, we’re not in the second wave now – it’s just that the first wave is now hitting states that it neglected to hit earlier. The virus doesn’t want to leave anybody out!). As Dr. Redfield of the CDC said (before Trump tried to shut him up at a news conference a couple months ago), the second wave will be much deadlier partly because it will coincide with the normal fall flu wave. So we urgently need masks, testing and tracing for the fall, as well as for now.

If you and the GOP don’t change course very soon – which involves putting the hammer on Trump in some way, although it shouldn’t require removing him completely – you will be forever remembered as the party that did nothing to fix the problem, when decisive action could have greatly ameliorated it. Your grandchildren will try to change the subject when somebody asks about you at school. Is that what you want?


The Numbers
As I have since Saturday, I’m omitting the usual table of projected deaths, because I think the current very low reported deaths figures probably reflect the July 4 holiday weekend, not a significant new drop in deaths (although I wish that were the case!). Since the effects of the weekend closing usually last a couple days into the week, I probably won’t resume the projections until Wednesday. But the numbers below are all up-to-date.

I. Total deaths
Total US deaths as of yesterday: 132,993
Increase in deaths since previous day: 422
Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 3% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above; it was 3% 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: 3,041,129
Increase in reported cases since previous day: 57,974
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: 1,325,516
Total Deaths as of yesterday: 132,933
Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 9% (vs. 9% yesterday)
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 44% in mid-April.


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

Deaths and Recoveries

I’m not bothering with my usual Numbers section today, since the 1-day and 7-day rates of increase in deaths and cases haven’t changed at all, and the ratio of deaths to closed cases remains at 17%. The projected deaths numbers are close to what they were yesterday. I haven’t discussed the ratio of deaths to closed cases for a while, although I’ve been reporting it. To refresh your memory, this is the ratio of total Covid-19 deaths so far to “closed cases”; closed cases is the sum of deaths so far and “recoveries” so far. The fact that the US rate is 17% means that, of all closed cases so far in the pandemic, 17% of them have resulted in death. This is down substantially from the initial value of 41%, in late March, when Worldometers started reporting recoveries. But it is still quite high – it seems to mean that, if you’re determined to have a “case” of Covid-19, the odds are close to 1 in 5 that you will die. I’ve been periodically comparing the US performance in this ar...
Read more