I can’t say I wasn’t warned

I’ve written before about a very prescient Wall Street Journal article[i] by Scott Gottlieb, former FDA Commissioner under Trump, that appeared in late January, 2020. It foretold the coming coronavirus epidemic in the US (no use of the word “pandemic”, since the article just addressed the US). Most importantly, it listed five things that should be undertaken right away to, if not prevent the epidemic, at least mitigate it. It will surprise nobody to learn that none of those steps were taken until months later (and a couple took at least a year to put in place), when the exponential spread of the virus made them hugely more difficult.

Even though I’m a subscriber to the WSJ and usually read it carefully, I don’t remember seeing that article; and if I did, it didn’t make an impression on me. Like most other people, I thought the Chinese had gotten the Wuhan virus under control – at the cost of a total lockdown of 20 million people or so. The US clearly didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

However, I did see this article[ii] on February 20, 2020, also by Dr. Gottlieb. This one made an impression on me, and I tore it out and put it in my briefcase to read during the business trip I was starting that day. In this article, Dr. Gottlieb wasn’t playing Cassandra anymore. Cases of the novel coronavirus were beginning to appear – although most Americans (and certainly me) still didn’t believe this would turn out to be a big deal.

Of course, this did turn out to be a big deal. But Dr. Gottlieb was one of only a small number of scientists that accurately predicted that. Here’s the first paragraph of the article:

A mere 15 cases of the Wuhan coronavirus have been diagnosed in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that number hasn’t budged in a week. But the true number of cases is unknown, because the U.S. is testing only those who recently arrived from China or have been in close contact with confirmed patients. Public-health authorities need to be prepared for a wider outbreak.

Dr. Gottlieb identified the real problem in this paragraph: It was likely there were already widespread coronavirus infections in the US, but the lack of testing capacity meant we weren’t going to be able to find them all through direct testing of the general public. Of course, Dr. Gottlieb had pointed to the need to ramp up testing capacity quickly in his January article (and we now know that the US could have had a big testing capability at least in the first half of February, were it not for bungling by the CDC and the FDA).

However, he didn’t indulge in “I told you so” complaints. Instead, he pointed out something we could do right away: start looking for patients with unexplained lung infections showing up in hospitals, then concentrate our limited supply of tests on screening those people (Dr. Gottlieb went on to advocate almost the same set of steps as he’d advocated in the January article, except this time with more detail).

However, the CDC was already in chaos, and since former President Trump was attacking anyone at the CDC who dared state publicly that we might be in trouble (even though some Republican Senators had a briefing in January from the intelligence community, stating that we were in from some very rough times indeed. Fortunately for them, some of those Senators heeded those words of warning, and made the pandemic a lot smoother for themselves by buying Zoom, Peloton and other “pandemic stocks”), it’s not surprising that nobody at the CDC was interested in…you know, protecting the health of the American people. Even Dr. Fauci continued to deny that there was a big problem with testing, at least until the end of February.

After being quite impressed with the article, I threw it away, and didn’t think much more about it until March 22, a little more than a month later. By then, the world had completely changed.

 

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, July 31.

Month

Deaths reported during month/year

Avg. deaths per day during month/year

Deaths as percentage of previous month/year

Month of March 2020

4,058

131

 

Month of April 2020

59,812

1,994

1,474%

Month of May 2020

42,327

1,365

71%

Month of June 2020

23,925

798

57%

Month of July 2020

26,649

860

111%

Month of August 2020

30,970

999

116%

Month of Sept. 2020

22,809

760

75%

Month of Oct. 2020

24,332

785

107%

Month of Nov. 2020

38,293

1,276

157%

Month of Dec. 2020

79,850

2,576

209%

Total 2020

354,215

1,154

 

Month of Jan. 2021

98,604

3,181

119%

Month of Feb. 2021

68,918

2,461

70%

Month of March 2021

37,945

1,224

55%

Month of April 2021

24,323

811

64%

Month of May 2021

19,843

661

82%

Month of June 2021

10,544

351

53%

Month of July 2021

8,833

287

84%

Month of August 2021

31,160

1,005

351%

Month of Sept. 2021

56,687

1,890

182%

Month of Oct. 2021

49,992

1,613

88%

Month of Nov. 2021

38,364

1,279

77%

Month of Dec. 2021

41,452

1,337

108%

Total 2021

492,756

1,350

158%

Month of Jan. 2022

65,855

2,124

159%

Month of Feb. 2022

63,451

2,266

96%

Month of March 2022

31,427

1,014

50%

Month of April 2022

13,297

443

42%

Month of May 2022

11,474

370

86%

Month of June 2022

11,109

370

97%

Month of July 2022

11,903

384

107%

Total Pandemic so far

1,055,487

1,234

 

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,055,487

Average daily deaths last seven days: 499

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 450

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.3%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 93,192,047             

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 997,108 (142,444/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 919,743 (131,392/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 1.1% (1.0% last week)

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


[i] If you would like to see the text of this article, email me and I’ll send you a PDF. I quoted extensively from it in my post linked at the beginning of this post.

[ii] If you would like to see a PDF of this article, email me.

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