Should we have waved the white flag for Covid in May 2020?

I don’t have time to go back and read many of my old posts in this blog (there are 337 of them as of today), but in the course of finding a topic for this post, I came across this post from May 15, 2020. I was particularly struck by it, for two reasons:

The first was that the person who appeared to be waving the white flag on Covid was none other than Leanna Wen, the former health commissioner of Baltimore who was writing for WaPo (and continues to, thank goodness); she later became one of my heroes for her forthright stand on anti-Covid policy.

However, in the article I referred to in my post, she appeared to be giving up on beating Covid at all – essentially saying we should drop our various lockdown policies and figure out how to live with it. She wrote this at a time when 1,000 to 2,500 people were dying of Covid every day. On that day, 21% of all Covid cases in the US resulted in death (vs. a fraction of 1% now), although even this was down from late March 2020, when close to half of all people who were confirmed to have Covid died from it.

The other thing I found really striking about this post was it was written in a significant week. Long afterwards, I looked back at my numbers from the early months of the pandemic and I saw that, if deaths had continued to increase at the rate they were increasing at the end of March 2020 (when they were almost doubling every day), the entire population of the US would have been dead by the middle of May.

Of course, that didn’t happen, mostly because there were drastic lockdowns in a number of states in April. It would have been better if they’d been everywhere, but the fact that Covid didn’t kill many millions of Americans was due to the fact that at least some parts of the country did the right thing.

Fortunately, Dr. Wen didn’t pursue her argument from the article any further. Instead, such notable medical experts as Donald J. Trump, Fox News, and the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal took up this banner (actually, they were already trumpeting it, so to speak). The result was that the US now has the highest reported pandemic deaths per capita of any large country. But at least the great majority of us are alive, thanks in part to Dr. Wen’s subsequent advice.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, October 23.

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%
Month of August 2022	16,199	540	136%
Month of September 2022	13,074	436	81%
Total Pandemic so far	1,092,948	1,131

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,092,948

Average daily deaths last seven days: 345

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 375

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.2%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 99,087,548             

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 237,423 (33,918/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 289,859 (41,408/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.2% (0.3% last week)

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