Posted by Sorry I’ve been away. I have been posting on my personal Facebook page about the mortality data from the Covid pandemic, and I haven’t been doing a lot of Healthy Wage and DietBet stuff.
But now we have an updated timeline for emerging from extreme mitigation of April 30.
This is based on this model. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force looked at it and told the President that if we don’t continue to mitigate as we have been for the last 5-10 days, the mortality will be in the millions for Covid-19. This doesn’t include non-Covid deaths due to not getting proper medical care, when the system gets overwhelmed.
The model predicts 40,000 to 160,000 lost at this time in the US. Dr Fauci predicted 100,000 to 200,000.
Here are my thoughts on this:
—I fully agree with the scope of these numbers. I was doing a half-assed trend fit in Excel and my predictions were actually similar to these. A bit rosier, but it’s still like 41,000 by late spring. I got NY at 15,600, LA at 2,000, MI at 3,400.
—The peak daily mortality in the hotspots now is gonna be in the days around Easter, so politically it’s probably a bad move to lift the guidelines at that time.
—But the hotspots are going to be very quiet by the end of April, if we all keep doing what we are doing, and getting the virus numbers down.
—It sucks having to be shut down for another month-plus, and I hope our small businesses get through it okay. But to be honest, if we loosened up at Easter, we’d still be doing social distancing lite for many months longer, because there would still be too many bugs around.
—Going another 3 weeks beyond Easter is going to kill much more of them off. We are going to have people moving from hotspots to non-hotspots, particularly when the medical systems get surged, and we may need time for the escaping bugs to die off.
—We have to figure out a way to congregate in relatively dense groups safely. Otherwise, restaurants and bar can’t function profitablya, and places like Mackinac Island can’t have a tourist season (ferry boat capacity limitations and Main Street crowds come to mind). No public fireworks shows for the 4th. No baseball.
—I think what really hurt New Orleans is Mardi Gras weekend—mosh pit densities, plastic beads, few restrooms, garbage everywhere. Perhaps after April we can allow congregations maintaining 2’ or so of space and wear non-surgical masks (to block contact transmission from hand to face). By then there should be very little Covid around, and isolation becomes possible without shutting everything down.
I downloaded the data from the study and they have min/max/average death predictions per day for each state. If we do better than their averages consistently then we can achieve the lower end of their spread.
I have decided to use this blog to document our performance to the model over the next 32 days. I am hopeful we can beat the model and have a good chance of emerging on May 1 from shelter-in-place, with a strategy to control Covid until we can either coexist with it (herd immunity) or eradicate it.
Meanwhile, keep healthy and stay healthy.
Michael
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