Build the walls (and fences)!

A few days ago, the Times published an article by Thomas Pueyo. It was reading a post by him (now read by well over 100 million people and translated into 40 languages) that led me to write the first of these pandemic posts.

The gist of the article is that, along with massive testing, contact tracing, isolation of sick people and mask wearing, there’s an important element that’s missing from the measures now being taken (with varying degrees of success, to be sure) to bring the novel coronavirus under control in the US. We need to build walls (total shutdown of travel) and fences (allowing travel but with quarantining at the destination), both between states and between the US and other countries. Otherwise, any state that does a good job and brings its cases under control will soon see their work go for naught as infected people from other states come to visit. 

He ably demonstrates the importance of walls and fences with the help of some really great moving graphics. What I found most impressive was his discussion of the experience of Alaska and Hawaii. Both states went through lockdowns that were quite effective in bringing new infections down, and both put quarantine rules into effect for all travelers coming into the state. 

However, Hawaii enforced those rules, while Alaska didn’t (it was easier in Hawaii, of course, since the state is composed of islands).  The results: Hawaii’s active cases stayed low (although they climbed again in August. Cell phone data showed that only 40% of visitors respected the full two-week quarantine rules, which didn’t involve actual surveillance, as was done in Taiwan and South Korea), while Alaska’s climbed to a level about ten times what they were before they locked down. 

Since the US still bans travelers from most countries (and those countries are returning the favor, of course), you could say that on a national level, the country is taking Pueyo’s advice. But Pueyo says that no state has effective controls on interstate travel now. Since things aren’t improving at the current time and it’s very likely they’ll get worse as the weather gets colder, there will definitely need to be more stringent measures – especially universal mask wearing. 

But since the current administration is dead set against doing anything on a national level that will actually help fix the problem – and even talks of pursuing herd immunity, which worked really well (sarcasm alert) in Sweden and the UK, and would likely lead to 1 to 2 million deaths in the US – it’s inevitable that some states won’t take the measures needed to keep their infections under control. Which means the states that do that will have to put up fences or even walls to protect the progress they’ve made from citizens of the state who haven’t done the job. 

Isn’t that a nice idea?

 

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 3.2%.

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	7,556	1,079
August 22	7,552	1,079
August 29	6,675	954
Month of August	30,970	999	116%
September 5	5,961	852
September 12	5,310	759
September 19	5,773	825
September 26	5,941	849
Month of Sept.	24,362	812	79%
Total March – September	212,103

Red = projected numbers

 

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 203,188

Deaths reported yesterday: 875

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 2.9% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. 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: 6,928,304

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 53,708

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 4.9%  

 

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 4,192,774

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 203,188

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 4.6%

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.

 

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 4.9%

For comparison, the recent peak for this rate was 27% in late July, although the peak in late March was 75%. This is published by Johns Hopkins. As of 9/15, rate for New York state: .9%. For Texas: 7.9%. For Florida: 12.3%.  For Arizona: 6.9. For California: 3.3%).

 

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