How naïve I was…

On March 18, 2020, I put up my fifth post in this blog (this is my 356^th post, for those keeping score at home). I had written my first pandemic post (although I wrote it on my cybersecurity blog) on Saturday, March 14. This was right after I’d read a really disturbing article that shattered my assumption that the unfortunate incident in Wuhan two months previous could never happen here.

I recently reread the March 18 post because a significant number of people have been reading it in the last couple of months, even though I haven’t referred to it at all. Of course, I can’t ask those people why they’re reading it, but what struck me when I reread it was my (in retrospect, of course) incredible naivete when I wrote it. It’s instructive to read some of my statements, a little more than three years later:

Since there have already been thousands of deaths worldwide (but not yet tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions), the battle is to keep that number as low as possible. Clearly, there will be at least in the hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, not tens of thousands – but will there be millions? 

Note that I was wondering how many deaths due to the new coronavirus would occur worldwide, and I thought it likely would be below a million. As of a few days ago, the number stood at 6.9 million. To be honest, I had thought (before I saw the figure 20 minutes ago) that it would be much more than that, maybe 20 million.[i]

Our goal at this point should be to keep total deaths from the pandemic – in the US – below 100,000, and of course, as far below that figure as possible.

The current deaths figure for the US is about 1.13 million. Note this is more than 1/7 of the global total. Of large countries, the US figure is second only to Brazil’s on a per capita basis. And being behind Brazil isn’t any indication of virtue, given that their president at the time, Bolsonaro, was literally encouraging people to get infected, in a misguided attempt to achieve herd immunity. 

There were people talking about adopting exactly that policy in the US, including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior advisor at the White House. Of course, as long as you weren’t bothered by the prospect of about 200 million deaths in the US, that would have been a good policy to follow. You can be sure that the people who were advocating that policy were taking all the steps they could take to make sure they wouldn’t be in that 200 million figure! 

This is why our mortality rate is almost unique among “developed” countries in having gone up during the last two years, not down.

In the post, I focused on how awesome exponential growth was, since total deaths had grown from 1 to 100 in two weeks. I estimated that, if nothing was done to trim this growth (i.e. lockdowns), there would be 60,000 deaths in three weeks. Fortunately, there were lockdowns in at least some states, and there were “only” 15,000 deaths in three weeks. But we still ended up at well over 1 million deaths.

What I didn’t mention in that post was that, if I extrapolated the current rate of growth in deaths into the future, there would be good news and bad news. The good news was that the pandemic would be over in the US by about mid-May (of 2020, of course) – that is, less than two months after I wrote the post. However, the bad news was that the entire US population would be dead by that day. That’s a hell of a way to end a pandemic.

However, I looked on the bright side:

I’m actually optimistic that total lockdown will happen next week – and if it doesn’t happen next week, it absolutely will happen the following week. Why do I say this? Because of exponential growth. Reported (not actual) cases will be over 40,000 by next Wednesday (and almost certainly higher), meaning that total deaths due to just those infections will ultimately be around 1300 (using the same 3% figure for mortality, which is in the high middle of the range estimated in the article that spurred Saturday’s post, which BTW has had 40 million views in the past week).

I expect that these numbers will finally spur the White House to order a nationwide lockdown (including lockdown of all travel except for emergency needs) next week.

It seems my optimism was badly misplaced. More on why it was misplaced in a subsequent post.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, May14.

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%
Month of October 2022	12,399	400	95%
Month of November 2022	9,221	307	74%
Month of December 2022	11,978	386	130%
Total 2022	271,387	744	-45%
Month of January 2023	17,768	573	148%
Month of February 2023	11,247	402	63%
Month of March 2023	7,885	263	70%
Month of April 2023	4,581	153	58%
Total Pandemic so far	1,162,701	1,013

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,162,701

Average daily deaths last seven days: 39

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 370

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.0%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 106,792,474

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 24,178 (3,454/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 137,969 (19,710/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.0% (0.1% last week)

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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[i] This is the number from Worldometers, which has been my source from almost the beginning of the pandemic. They say they correct for undercounting deaths in most countries(which occurred a lot), so that makes the relatively small size of this number all the more striking.