Bring in the army?

Quick: Which country has the highest number of Covid deaths per capita? No, not the US. Not Brazil. Not the UK. It’s Israel. This might surprise you, since early on Israel seemed to be having great success in getting the virus under control. Unfortunately, this success led to overconfidence, and in May the economy was widely reopened, including schools. Cases and deaths spiked to 85,300 and 619 respectively (according to a great article in the New York Times).

Of course, the Israeli story is a lot like the US story, except on a smaller scale. In the US, even though the initial response to the novel coronavirus was delayed and bungled, the fact that there were widespread lockdowns in late March and April (at least), brought the 7-day growth rates in daily new cases and new deaths in early June down to less than a tenth of what they had been in early April. However, this was taken as evidence of success, and a number of states (some of which had never really locked down in the first place) opened up very aggressively – with the result that we will likely have at least 300,000 official Covid deaths by the end of the year.

But now the stories diverge.  In both Israel and the US, there was clear evidence that this resurgence wasn’t in any way inevitable but was due to gross mismanagement by the people in charge. One would think the normal reaction to that would be to put someone else in charge – not of the whole government, but of the response to the pandemic. Someone who would be given the power to override the inevitable political pressures against doing the right thing.

Indeed, this was the reaction in Israel. Last month, Ronni Gamzu, a physician and former hospital administrator, was placed in charge of the pandemic response, replacing Premier Netanyahu in this role. And on Tuesday, Mr. Gamzu called in the army to take over testing and contact tracing, pointing out that the Health Ministry hadn’t performed these two vital functions well enough, leading to the current dire situation. The reaction to this wasn’t to decry the fact that the military was getting involved in a domestic crisis, but to ask why this wasn’t done earlier; in fact, it seems many in Israel had assumed all along that this would happen.

Here in the US, it was clear almost from the start of the pandemic that President Trump simply wouldn’t be able to bring the virus under control. Not only was the federal response incredibly inept (the most striking evidence being that today testing is so far inadequate that, in the hardest-hit states, contact tracing can’t be done at all – since test results don’t come back for 1-2 weeks and people can’t be isolated to keep them from spreading the virus. This means the virus is out of control in those states. Of course, Trump, after initially vowing to beat the virus, quickly changed his tune and simply said that he wasn’t responsible for anything – the states were. It turns out that strategy didn’t work too well.

On March 25, I wrote a post that said both Trump and Pence needed to be removed from control of the pandemic response, and somebody competent be given authority beyond the president’s own authority. I had Bill Gates in mind for the position, but other people, Republicans and Democrats, could have done it. The primary requirement would be that the person would pay attention to facts and science and act accordingly.

Of course, I wasn’t surprised when the country didn’t rise up with one voice to support my suggestion. But I honestly believed it was only a matter of time before Mitch McConnell – the one individual who had the power to force Trump to make this concession – would realize this needed to be done for the good of the country. What would force McConell’s hand? Why, the rising death numbers. As of that day, we had suffered 1,027 deaths in total over the pandemic, and I was predicting then that we would have at a minimum 12,477 deaths over the course of the pandemic (and that was only if there were a total national lockdown, with prohibition of travel, that day. I knew that in fact that total pandemic deaths would be much higher than that).

 However, we’re now at about 170,000 deaths, and that still hasn’t changed McConnell’s mind. I realized this wouldn’t happen when in June he denounced the idea of more aid to state and local governments as a “blue state bailout” – this at a time when Kentucky had the highest unemployment rate in the country, and needed the money more than many other states (it still does). Like a lot of other GOP Senators, he doesn’t even care about the people of his own state, so why should I have expected him to care about the whole country? Silly me…

Since there’s nobody to push Trump to give up his control over the pandemic response, and since he clearly won’t give it up himself, we’ll just have to continue on our current downhill course until January 20, I guess. The American people have spoken!

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	7,688	1,098
August 22	8,047	1,150
August 29	8,421	1,203
Month of August	33,750	1,089	127%
Total March – August	190,521

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 169,135

Deaths reported yesterday: 1,374

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: 5,360,488

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 53,637

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 8%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 2,813,125

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 169,135

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