Covid Pause – Minus 23 Days and Counting (60,415)

The IHME model looks better than ever!

Check out the Big Hotspots:

So on Maundy Thursday New York and Michigan will peak, and Louisiana peaked yeaterday, according to the model. But all of them drop to zero death by May 1

Meanwhile, for other states:

They are predicting peaks in 2 weeks and mortality ramping down through May.

I still question why LA, NY, and MI should drop to zero death by May 1. That means by Easter weekend, there will be no new cases added. If any significant number of cases are added, you’ll see 3-5% of them turn into death toll in 2-3 weeks. I wrote in an earlier post that we should see mortality tail off more gradually, as mitigation does its job in reducing the number of cases on an exponential basis.

TX and FL see later peaks with more gradual tail-offs. It appears to me that IHME assumes “flatten the curve” is a quite literal thing—there are always the same number of cases, but you can only control when you process them and how fast. If you do nothing at all, you take the hit all at once and get it over with—but you severely over-stress the medical systems and cause harm by not properly treating non-Covid patients. On the other hand, mitigation will merely spread those same cases into the late spring and summer, while protecting the medical systems from over-stress.

But doesn’t severe mitigation reduce the number of humans carrying the active virus? If you do it long enough everywhere, I should think that you reduce the number of people infected so that the deaths in May go down everywhere. All states will have tail-offs that look like the yellow trace in this graph:

Of course, if mitigation is all you do, the virus will eventually infect everyone, and a certain percentage will succumb. But there are all sorts of treatment being developed that should help us combat it. Perhaps a vaccine will come soon…and perhaps hydroxychloroquine or other therapies will prove itself to better enable an infected patient to ward off the onslaught until his body develops immunity.

The models, of course, assume mandatory shelter-in-place everywhere through May 31. There will be plenty of agitation to keep the country shut down until then. I suppose the IHME people have a stake in making that happen, since their model calls for it.

But keep an eye on all the data this month—the daily care count, the hospitalization numbers, and the mortality—and follow the progress on antibody and other mass testing. We may be able to develop a viable strategy to exit this abominable state we are in.