He saw it coming

The Atlantic’s daily newsletter had a great embedded article yesterday. I’m reproducing it in full (the newsletter is free to everybody anyway, although you do need to subscribe to see articles beyond a certain number. I highly recommend you subscribe, since they’ve provided some of the best coverage of the election and especially the pandemic). I’m sure you’ll agree this is quite remarkable. BTW, Ron Klain is the incoming White House Chief of Staff.

It is a truism in journalism that predicting the future is perilous, mainly because it hasn’t happened yet. So when we publish articles that, over time, prove their prescience, attention ought to be paid.  

In late January, at a moment when most of us could not imagine that 2020 would soon come to resemble 1918, The Atlantic published an article by Ron Klain titled, “Coronavirus Is Coming—And Trump Isn’t Ready.”

Our Ideas editor, Yoni Appelbaum, had asked Klain, then a private citizen and now President-elect Joe Biden’s chief of staff, to help our readers understand the risks ahead. Klain, who served as President Barack Obama’s Ebola coordinator, suggested keeping an eye on one question in particular: Whether President Trump could bring himself to listen to Anthony Fauci. That, Klain said, would be key.

In the article that resulted from this conversation, Klain wrote, “Five presidents—liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—have looked to Tony Fauci for advice; it is not impossible to imagine Trump being the first to angrily dismiss the counsel he offers if it does not fit with his own poor instincts.”  

I called Klain the other day to ask him how he knew, to such a granular degree, that the Trump-Fauci relationship would go sideways. “We knew already that Trump has a style of governing that rejects facts and that demands that people see the world his way, that they live in his counterfactual reality,” he said. “He also has a tendency to downplay threats, whatever kind of threats they are. I knew Dr. Fauci well enough to know that he was going to tell the truth and speak out and that sooner or later that would run afoul of the Trump approach to governance.”

Klain was in a unique position to make predictions about COVID-19. As the coordinator of Obama’s successful fight against Ebola, he had developed important knowledge about infectious disease. But he also gained an understanding of Trump’s destructive impact on public health.

 

 

“One thing people forget is that after ‘birtherism’ blew up on Trump, he faded from view for a little while and only emerged back into our politics around Ebola,” Klain said. “He was the leading public voice attacking Obama’s Ebola response. His tweets—there are studies that show this—were a main cause of the fear that galvanized around Ebola. He tweeted that the efforts to fight Ebola in West Africa were a mistake, that bringing home the doctor who had contracted Ebola in West Africa was a mistake—he said he should be left to die. Trump was completely unhinged from science, and this had a significant impact on the public psyche. It gave me an early indication of how he would handle a pandemic.”

What did Klain learn by watching Trump? Overpromising solutions in a pandemic is dangerous, but so is under-promising: “One of the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in is that President Trump believed, or simply said, that this virus would be gone like a miracle. It would be gone by Easter; it will be gone by Memorial Day.”

Biden, Klain said, will take a more nuanced approach. “President-elect Biden is very clear in saying that COVID is not going to go away in 100 days, that life will not go back to normal in 100 days. But it’s important for a leader in this situation to offer a mix of realism and hope. I don’t think you’re going to get people to participate in a response if you tell them that the slog goes on forever, that there are no midpoints, no progress. But you just can’t overpromise.”

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). The projections are based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 6.1%.

Month

Deaths reported during month

Avg. deaths per day during month

Deaths as percentage of previous month’s

Month of March

4,058

131

 

Month of April

59,812

1,994

1,474%

Month of May

42,327

1,365

71%

Month of June

23,925

798

57%

Month of July

26,649

860

111%

Month of August

30,970

999

116%

Month of Sept.

22,809

760

75%

Month of Oct.

24,332

785

107%

Month of Nov.

38,293

1,276

157%

Month of Dec.

83,294

2,687

218%

Total March-Dec.

357,659

1,165

 

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 314,629

Deaths yesterday: 3,538 (this is an all-time record, more than 400 more than the record set all the way back on…Dec. 9)

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 6.1% (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 one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 17,394,314

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 248,686

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 9.9%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 10,170,788

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 314,629

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 3.0%

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.

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 11.2%

For comparison, the previous peak for this rate was 7.8% in late July, although the peak in early April was 22%. The rate got down to 4.0% in early October but has been climbing since then. This is published by Johns Hopkins.

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

 

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