At least the Admiral is determined to go down with his ship

The Times ran an article this morning noting that coronavirus testing numbers have been down in the US recently. For once, this isn’t due to shortages of testing kits or supplies – it appears to be driven by a fall in demand. Why would demand for testing fall now? Even though the number of daily new cases is down maybe about 10,000 from a couple weeks ago (yesterday’s number was 60,000), it is still far above the lows of around 20,000 that the US experienced in mid-June – and it is of course still much higher than any other country in the world.

But the article points to what surely is the reason for this: With wait times for test results still far too high, many people realize that there’s no point in waiting in line for hours for a test, since by the time they get the results (still often more than a week), they will be useless. And of course, this means that contact tracing is still a pointless exercise in states with high and growing infection numbers – so the virus continues raging out of control in those states.

However, not surprisingly, Admiral Brett Giroir, the administration’s “testing czar”, denies there is inadequate testing. Quoting the article, “The administration has asked states to test at least 2 percent of their populations each month, or the equivalent of about 220,000 people per day nationally, which Admiral Giroir said would be enough to identify rising hot spots. We are doing the appropriate amount of testing now to reduce the spread, flatten the curve, save lives,” he said this week.” Since the US is currently testing about 800,000 people a day, this sounds quite reasonable, right? We’re actually doing four times as much testing as we really need to do now! Ergo we’re meeting our target many times over.

The Admiral is engaging in a time-honored tactic used by government officials and military officers to justify their failures: Instead of explaining why they can’t attain the original target, they instead assert that their actual target was much smaller, and therefore they’ve been wildly successful at attaining that level. He is defining the target as “reducing the spread, flattening the curve and saving lives”.

That was the target we needed to attain (but didn’t attain, by a long shot) in March and April, when the goal was just to mitigate the damage by keeping the hospitals from being overwhelmed. Since the country was mostly locked down, the idea was that we were going to have a certain number of cases and deaths regardless – we just wanted to keep that number as small as possible by reducing hospital overcrowding. Getting the virus under control, and then thinking about how we could reopen workplaces and schools, was a problem for another day.

The curve was mostly flattened, and even the recent outbreaks in states like Florida, Texas, Arizona and California don’t seem to have caused hospitals to become overwhelmed. However, now we are trying to get the virus under control, and we are trying to reopen businesses and schools. Clearly, even 800,000 tests a day isn’t enough, since the virus is still spreading uncontrolled in some places, and since efforts to reopen schools for in-person instruction are running into huge headwinds. It’s clear that, if we really do want to reopen schools for all students by say January, all students and staff members in many areas will have to be tested at least once a week and maybe every day or two. The same goes for some businesses. We clearly need maybe 2 or 3 million tests a day, not 800,000. And we need results in one day at most, since otherwise infected – but asymptomatic – kids will infect their teachers and other students, while they’re waiting for their test results.

Another article in the Times today pointed out that testing of promising treatments for Covid-19 is proceeding much more slowly than expected, due in large part to…get ready…inadequate testing. To explain why this is the case, the article describes how two of the most promising new drugs must be administered within three days of taking a positive test. Yet, the results are on average taking longer than that to come back, meaning the person who otherwise would have been lucky enough to participate in the trial won’t be able to. So these two drugs most likely won’t be available for general use this year.

What is really distressing is that the good Admiral, like so many others in the administration, is much more worried about countering criticism than actually addressing the problem. The first article points out that there’s virtually no health expert that believes the US is anywhere near the amount of testing that we need at this point in time, but Adm. Giroir is saying we’re doing far more than what’s needed. Of course, like all of this administration’s efforts to deny reality, this will result in far more infected people and deaths than would be needed if we had people in charge who actually looked at the facts and science and acted accordingly.

We will have those people in charge starting Jan. 20. Meanwhile, we’ll blow past 300,000 deaths this year, and maybe be over 400,000 by the time the new administration can turn things around.

And this is assuming we don’t have a huge fall wave that overwhelms the hospitals because it coincides with the seasonal flu wave.

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	23,925	798	57%
July 4	4,166	595
July 11	5,087	727
July 18	5,476	782
July 25	6,971	996
Month of July	26,649	860	111%
August 1	8,069	1,153
August 8	7,153	1,022
August 15	7,438	1,063
August 22	7,773	1,110
August 29	8,124	1,161
Month of August	32,923	1,062	124%
Total March – August	189,694

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 171,535

Deaths reported yesterday: 1,113

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% two days ago. 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: 5,476,266

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 55,526

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

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 2,875,147

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 171,535

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 6%

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