COVID-19 Daily Update: 200,000 dead in the USA

 Today the USA passed 200,000 deaths. 

World wide we are nearly at 1 million deaths. 

Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ 

Early predictions back in March were that between 100,000 to 200,000 people might die from COVID-19 in the USA if we did nothing. 

We didn't do nothing. But what we did was just as ineffective. 

Now over 200,000 are dead, worse than the worst of the projections. There is a narrative that these projections were wrong... too "high". 

It turns out that they were actually far too low. 

They were wrong, in other ways. The assumed fatality rate was too high in the early models, but they under-estimated how many would be infected. They over estimated how quickly the disease would decline, and they severely over estimated the quality of our response.

We failed, beyond the wildest imaginings of the worst case models from March. 

Comments

  1. DCHARRISONSeptember 16, 2020 at 10:10 AM

    While your conclusion is correct—that we failed—I distinctly remember some very early models predicting 2,000,000 dead “if we do nothing”. So I did a little research… and I found it — from the Imperial College (London):

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8124327/Two-million-die-coronavirus-did-social-distancing-cut-that.html

    https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-uk-report-projects-2-million-deaths-without-action-2020-3

    A week later, your number of 200,000 seems to have become the “do nothing” number:

    https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-deaths-us-predictions-social-distancing-2020-3

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. jlcarroll@gmail.comSeptember 26, 2020 at 2:20 PM

      If we assume everyone will be infected eventually, the 2 million mark isn't impossible to hit, depending on what you assume the IFR is.

      The CDC was estimating an IFR of 0.65% a while back (haven't looked to see if they have updated that). So if everyone in the US is infected, then that's 2.13 million dead. 200,000 was an estimate based on the hope that a small percent of us would end up infected.

      Clearly that didn't pan out.

      Delete

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