You might want to put your 2021 Mardi Gras party on hold

  

The Times ran an opinion piece today entitled “Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year”. The author’s main reason for saying this is that, even though it’s likely there will likely be an “effective” and reasonably safe vaccine this year, it’s highly unlikely that it will produce the desired herd immunity anytime soon, for a host of reasons laid out in the op-ed. The piece points out that it will be impossible for people to safely relax the precautions they’re now taking (or should be taking) - including no large indoor gatherings, wearing a mask, avoiding travel, etc. – until at least the last half of 2021.

This is of course sobering, although I wasn’t even planning on being able to return to anything like “normal” until next summer at the earliest. What I found most impressive in the article were these two paragraphs:

We wasted our chance to get a better summer in the spring. We wasted our chance to plan for the fall in the summer. We’re wasting time again now. Next year isn’t that far away.

We still need to figure out how to live in this new world, now, and that means embracing, finally, all the strategies for fighting the virus that many of us have resisted.

In other words, in the late spring the US really blew it by opening up too quickly, and even more by assuming that life could immediately get back to normal – so there was little preparation in some states for anything less than full reopening. Thus, the opportunity to make some progress in the summer was largely lost. This summer, we repeated that mistake by not planning for the fall, especially planning for schools to reopen safely – meaning partially, and with a lot of expensive measures in place to keep kids and faculty safe. The result is there will almost definitely be fewer kids in school this fall than if the administration had taken a realistic view, instead of assuming the virus would magically disappear by the summer.

Now we’ve clearly lost the opportunity to make progress in the fall (I’m saying this because my projected deaths numbers for September just jumped by about 3,000 today. I’m going to wait ‘til tomorrow to push the panic button, but this is the first big reversal since late June, when they started trending down); the only real question is whether we’ll have a huge upturn in deaths due to the flu season coinciding with the pandemic.

So if we want to make life a little better next year, we need to do the things that we should have been doing all along: greatly expanding testing availability, implementing the contact tracing that is almost nonexistent in some states, making sure that schools don’t reopen in areas that don’t meet CDC guidelines for doing so, and shutting down interstate (and in some cases intrastate) travel as much as possible. And if these don’t work and we get a big resurgence this fall, then we have to look at more lockdowns again.

Of course, the Trump administration isn’t going to do any of these things – in fact, they’ll continue to deny there’s even a problem. This means that we won’t even start planning for next year until after January 20. And that means we won’t really be coming out of the pandemic until next summer at the earliest, vaccine or no vaccine.

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	6,290	899
September 26	6,490	927
Month of Sept.	25,506	850	82%
Total March – September	213,247

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 200,197

Deaths reported yesterday: 1,170

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 3.2% (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: 6,788,471

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 38,463

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 4%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 4,068,704

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 200,197

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 5%

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: 5.3%

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