The coup failed; now comes the tsunami

There were three hugely important news items yesterday, two of which got lots of press and the third very little. The first was the news that President Trump’s efforts to use the courts are at a dead end. The US Supreme Court dismissed the very strange lawsuit from the state of Texas, asking that the election results in four other states be thrown out because they somehow offended Texans. The court did this in a one-sentence statement that essentially said “What is this s___??”

Of course, this won’t end Trump’s grousing about the election results, which will undoubtedly continue for years. But it does leave Trump in an interesting quandry: He has known all along that he had zero chance of overturning the election, but he realized that his efforts to do so – using a ragtag and discredited legal team that without a doubt didn’t cost much – were a wonderful fundraising opportunity for his new Save America PAC. In fact, of the more than $150 million that Trump raised by emails between the election and December 1, only a very small fraction went to the lawsuits. Donations needed to exceed $5,000 before a single penny went to the lawsuits. 3/4 of the balance went to the PAC (to be spent pretty much as Trump wants), and ¼ to the RNC.

The second item was the approval of the Pfizer vaccine. That of course got lots of attention, and well-deserved. On the other hand, it will be the summer at the earliest before the vaccine has any significant impact on the third news item (almost completely ignored): That the US yesterday recorded more Covid deaths this year than all US deaths from combat in World War II (291,557). Even worse, the US is now averaging over 3,000 Covid deaths per day (of course, more than deaths on 9/11), and the CDC says that will continue for the next three months. This means that:

·        Covid deaths in December will be far more than twice those of November, and close to 50% higher than April’s (which were the worst so far. Do you remember all the refrigerator trucks?).

·        Since 3,000 deaths a day equals 90,000 deaths a month, this means deaths through March will equal 357,000 (=my projected deaths this year, which is almost certainly low) + 270,000 = 627,000. Hopefully, measures that Biden puts in place will reduce the growth in deaths after that, and by the summer there should be some reduction due to the vaccine(s). So let’s say we go down to 50,000 deaths a month from April through June. This means total Covid deaths will be 777,000 by the end of June. And since deaths certainly won’t end then, this means the best case for total pandemic deaths is between 900,000 and 1 million.

·        But the idea that deaths per day are going to hit a 3-month plateau of 3,000 and stay there for three months isn’t at all tenable. If deaths just grow at the current 7-day rate of 6.0%, by the end of the year, we’ll be at 3,600 deaths a day, and that number will continue to grow. But it’s not likely that even the rate of increase in deaths will stay at 6%. It was around 4.0% just two weeks ago. Even if it just reaches 7%, that would add more than 12,000 deaths to each of the monthly totals. And of course, no law says it has to stop growing at 7%.

And here’s where the connection to the first news item comes in: Trump has done zero to improve the Covid situation since the election and a lot to make it worse, including hosting maskless superspreader parties in the White House and making a point of forcing the FDA to grant emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine late last night rather than this morning, as if that were going to make any difference at all in how quickly it will roll out. It will, however, destroy even more people’s faith in the vaccine, since it increases the perception that its approval was a politically-driven decision.

Wouldn’t it be great if Trump, and his GOP enablers in the House and Senate, had paid a little time to…you know…fighting the virus rather than doing their best to undermine American democracy? As GOP Governor Sununu of Massachusetts said in the Times this morning, it would be nice for Congress to “actually do something for the American people, surrounding the vaccines, surrounding Covid.” What a great idea! But not likely to go anywhere, of course, at least not with Rich Mitch McConnell in control of the Senate.

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 5.9%.

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.	82,809	2,671	216%
Total March-Dec.	357,174	1,163

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 302,762

Deaths yesterday: 3,031

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 6.0% (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: 16,295,714

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 246,761

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 10.3%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 9,507,476

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 302,762

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 3.1%

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: 11.0%

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.