Well, this was from March 8th. Using more napkin math and a hope for medication to combat it, I’m going with 320,255.
But that model, although it does project all the way to March, also has projections for June and July, not so far away. Those are what fascinate me. How are they projecting weeks of death rates this summer so high that everything up to now looks like miniscule foothills next to K2?
And 3000 for 9/11. >Insert COVID conspiracy theory here<
Well, there’s no way to reverse engineer their thinking. I mean, I presume they plugged some higher infection and mortality rates than some other projections but they’d basically have to explain it themselves.
I believe the US just passed the official 100,000 deaths mark, in reality probably somewhat higher. The Economist has an article about past and present forecasts, unfortunately it is behind a paywall, but the part you can see are the graphs the article discusses, so you can figure something out for yourself. Have a look: Early projections of covid-19 in America underestimated its severity | The Economist
We have the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), from Washington University, Youyang Gu, a “young graduate from the MIT” (cite from the article) “Mr. Gu’s model uses machine-learning algorithms to instruct a SEIR model (S: susceptible, E: exposed, I: infected, R: recovered or dead) that has recently been more accurate than forecasts from more established outfits.” Mr. Gu’s model predicts the highest death rate from the three. And finally the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the only one out of the three that has corrected the predictions downwards in the last weeks (see the color-coding for the different lines. Quite a clever graphic, actually).
My take: Very intelligent, well informed, experienced people can make very diverging predictions. But they correct them all the time; they are learning constantly and getting better!
I stick with my original prediction (no corretion, no learning, no getting better myself): one million until the end of the year, give or take 20%. Because of the second and third waves and because I am not an optimist about those things pertaining to collective social responsabily, good governance, common sense and love thy neighbour.
I just saw that my first reponse was “number 7 it is”, that is over one million. We shall see, I seem to be a wee tiny bit more optimistic than I was then.
A month ago, I predicted between 150,000 and 300,000 deaths this year from the coronavirus. I see no reason to change that. If I had to choose one of the OP’s ranges, I’d take 200K-300K. Given that even after a substantial decline in the covid-19 death rate, we’re still losing >8000 people per week to the virus, I think it would take a miracle to keep the death toll as low as 150K, especially with things opening up again. :eek:
Pardel-Lux, thanks for tipping me off to the Youyang Gu model. Looking at his historical performance compared to other models and the actual death rate, it’s pretty uncanny: About covid19-projections.com | COVID-19 Projections Using Machine Learning
I’m a wee bit less pessimistic now, maybe we’ll skate by with 1/4 million. Maybe 1/2 million. But 1 million is still possible with that second wave that will likely happen.
Sticking with my original estimate of 400,000, or 300,000 to 500,000. This number can be hugely effected by how successful we are at recognizing and protecting the vulnerable.
A lot of the antibody testing coming in in the US seems to be placing the current number of already infected at between a low of abut 3% and a high of 5%. If you assumed herd immunity kicks in at 70% that would say you would be looking at over 2 million yet to die. But that makes all sorts of possibly unreasonable simplifying assumptions. It takes no account of age distributions, other demographics, and the like. But it isn’t good.
This article on Medscape paints a not too happy picture of the outlook. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/931072
It could easily go to two million. I am banking an optimistic guess that we may improve care techniques and identifying and protecting the highest risk. I am honestly not all that optimistic we will succeed at that. I wonder if the U.S. population has the stomach to see deaths of 10,000 per day or more coming in day after day?
We have no idea with this virus what herd immunity looks like (assuming that it applies here) - it’s a new virus with a whole new range of effects and issues.
Still no clue as to where the final death toll will land.
We still have some idea. I picked 70% simply because that is a convenient figure that has been bandied about. Covid-19 isn’t as insanely infectious as say chickenpox. We have a good enough handle on R[sub]0[/sub] to be able to say that there will almost certainly be herd immunity. But it really doesn’t matter. We are talking deaths. Herd immunity is just a scale factor in that context. No herd immunity is the same as saying 100%. Herd immunity is just a result of damping out of spread with enough resistant people in the community. 70% isn’t unreasonable. It might be 90%. It can’t be more than 100%. That just changes the back of the envelope calculation based upon past infections to a bit under 3 million.
We are actually just working from a rough estimate of IFR. In Spain they got an IFR of about 1.1. NYC seems similar. The study I linked to for California might suggest an IFR of between 0.15 and 0.3% (They have an issue with self selection bias, so I’m giving a 2:1 variation because of that, which is possibly extreme.) IFR is the number we need. I think there is much evidence that it varies a lot with factors we don’t yet fully understand, but age demographics and racial demographics clearly matter. Maybe the average IFR will turn out to be about 0.8%. If you put a small bet on it being that you probably would not be wasting your money. 0.8 +/- 0.4 is my bet. But only by sticking my finger in the air. I think you would be taking very long odds on there being a major unknown component of the virus that changed the numbers much. Very rare complications are coming to light, but they are noise compared the gross IFR.
So, that gets you to an estimate of a worst case death count. One where there are no other mitigating factors or management. Still comes it at about 2 million. This is not of course a prediction. It is an estimate of an upper bound. The spectre of a second wave casts a shadow, and again, taking a bet on there being one that matches or exceeds the first one looks like smart money. But I don’t think anyone thinks it will be allowed to progress as badly as historical pandemics.
In the end we assume, and hope, that we are smarter than that.
Well, we already hit a hundred thousand, so I’m thinking one to two hundred thousand.
There seems to be around 58 thousand for April and will be around 40 thousand for May.
That means of the 102 thousand deaths, 98 thousand took place in just two months.
I would be surprised if it were to increase by more than 30 thousand for June - I think 25 thousand might be more realistic.
For July perhaps 21 thousand so by 1st August you would imagine total numbers being at maybe 140-145 thousand.
That would put the CDC model out by nearly 50%
There have been reports of Remsdvir offering the means to buy a little more recovery time - so one would expect that improvements to medical practice could reduce the toll, and the longer we look into the future the more I think the efficacy of treatment and support will improve.
Against that we have behavior, some of it will be ideologically driven but I think that economic pressure will force people to circulate more.
I would hope that it could be kept below 200 thousand up to 2021. I hope that is an overly pessimistic guess. There may well be significant adjustments made when the overall comparisons are made across the last decade and that could easily add 30 or 40 thousand that were not originally ascribed to Covid 19
When it comes to humanity - and especially humanity as it is currently behaving - I’m not convinced the smart money is on smart people. But I agree that the “worst case” is an upper limit, not the likeliest outcome.
I’m still pretty with my low end estimate of 350k. I think social distancing did a lot to keep the death toll down initially and I don’t think we have the political or social will to do that again in the fall so, while I think it will be high, I’m also pretty comfortable with my top end prediction of 1 million. Its a huge range though and I think 350k-500k it where the number will ultimately fall on 12/31.
It’s frustrating, because I feel like if we really had the national will to do a full, true lockdown while we did a WWII-style ramp up in testing capacity, followed by a massive test and contact trace regime, we could keep the death toll from being all that much higher than it already is now. A vaccine would be mostly irrelevant. But that does not remotely appear to be in the cards.
Based on Second Wave elements of the 1918 Epidemic, coupled with modern-day American Entitlement & Arrogance ( AEA ), I’d conservatively guess 450,000.
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