You are welcome, it was not me anyway, I just quoted the Economist. Your much more detailed article than my paywalled stub is… yeah, uncanny. But like on the stock market: past performance is no guarantee for future performance, is it?
We are relaxing the lock down here in Europe (personally: Brussels and Berlin first hand recent experience). I still do not understand why Brussels (Belgium) has been hit tenfold compared with Berlin (Germany), the behaviour I see would suggest the opposite 
And now both relax. I hope it is not too early. But both our links suggest it is, don’t they? :eek:
I wonder what the effect of the race protests will have in the US, I expect in the UK we might end up having to reverse some of our unlocking policies - we will start to see the results in the next week or so with an increase in infections.
Should imagine that national epidemiologists are holding their collective breaths.
And before them the reopening protests.
One thing I’ve noticed is that many of the protesters over the last week have been wearing masks. The reopening folks tended to avoid them. So there’s that. Demonstrators in my Long Island town have been about 100% masked. Counter demonstrators, not so much.
New cases have been stubbornly hovering around the 20K mark. But the death rate has been gradually sinking from a high of 5.97% of cases (May 20) down to 5.58% yesterday. We’re doing more testing, but I also suspect medical folks are learning more about keeping victims alive.
Projecting at a flat rate of 900 deaths per day, the total at the end of year would be just under 300K. Spiking up to just 1,150 per day the year end total would be just under 350K.
True. If you have enough stock pickers or enough modelers, at any snapshot in time someone is going to have the best record even if it’s just through flukey luck. Now that the spotlight’s on this guy, if his model continues to track with reality better than others it will really mean something.
Well yeah. They are in the protest marches too and trying to not breathe it in!
nm
But the number of deaths has been steadily declining for a while now. Over the past week, per Worldometer, there have been 5747 deaths attributed to Covid-19, or 821 per day. I think the rate will spike sometime, especially given the way hospital beds are filling up in a number of states that have relaxed their rules. But I think it may decline a bit more yet before it spikes.
Also, just spitballing about something I confess ignorance about, I wonder if there isn’t a seasonality effect, at least to some degree. The virus is still clearly with us, but maybe it’s less potent or not as easily transmittable during the hot weather. It just seems to me that the decline in deaths is steeper than can be explained by what people (and state governments) were doing three or four weeks ago.
I think everyone is still ignorant of that. This disease has only been around for two seasons after all. Hot v Cold countries hasn’t been an obvious factor so far though.
We’re almost in the middle of June, and I have an 85,000 buffer on my prediction. I guess it will all depend on what kind of comeback, if any, COVID-19 makes when flu season arrives.
The situation is absolutely on a knife edge, the last four days have seen the number of new infections stop falling and has leveled at around 20k per day, today might see an increase, however the anti-lockdown protests will be just starting to show up in the infections figures so the resultant deaths will take another two or three weeks - largely in states that have been far less affected up to now.
Well, options 1 and 2 in the OP’s poll are now in the rearview mirror, and 200,000 is looking entirely plausible.
Looking in retrospective, my speculations from march 29th were about 50% too optimistic in both cases.
I’d say 200k is the new optimistic minimum.
Agreed. I’d be shocked if it lands under that number. I’d actually be fairly shocked if it’s under 300K, and I still think my original prediction of a half million looks very plausible. We are already seeing signs of spikes, and there’s almost certainly going to be a second wave in the fall.
I still wonder just how good those numbers are. I understand the level of testing has escalated quite a bit lately.
I trust the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 to at least be reasonably reflective of what’s really happening. Ditto the number of hospitalizations, in jurisdictions where that’s being tracked (the problem is, that’s far from everywhere).
Oh, sometime today, the number of reported COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. will surpass the American death toll in WWI.
Awesome, now the next time someone wants to start a world war they can say “don’t worry, it’s not going to be Covid level bad.”
The anti lockdown protests were in April. I think we would have seen an impact by now.
Well, I predicted around 130k or rather an increase of 25k for June and it looks to be around 27k in reality
The race protests weren’t happening when I posted, but the unlock ones were, I had guessed at around 21k more deaths for July but given the huge spread this might be an underestimate, the actual death rate per infection seems to have reduced but healthcare systems in some states are under great pressure so this could easily rise again.
The infection rate is such that even with better therapy I do not think the daily number of deaths will fall, if there are less than 30k deaths for July I’d be surprised - meaning the total to 1st August will be something north of 160k, unfortunately I have a bad feeling that this is far too optimistic - the next three weeks of dealing with the huge rise of infections will tell
I was critical of the IHME model back in April:
This time I’m critical of them for (IMHO) going off the deep end in the other direction: they’re now predicting 410,451 U.S. Covid deaths by January 1.
Based on their graph, that’s about 960 deaths per day between now and October 1, then nearly 1400/day between then and November 1, then about 2,550 a day for the rest of the year.
Just for comparison purposes, per Worldometer, our worst week so far was April 15-21, when we averaged 2,250 deaths per day. So they’re expecting the entire last two months of the year to be worse than the peak of the plague back in April.
I just don’t see where all those deaths will come from. Put simply, the deaths have to come from areas that have already been hit hard, or areas that haven’t.
The problem with the latter possibility is that between the first wave (Northeast/West Coast/Midwest) and the second wave (Sun Belt), most of the major population centers have already been hit. Now the coronavirus is surging in places like Iowa and South Dakota, but you can’t get another NYC or Florida in those states, because there just aren’t that many people there. Sure, we can still have outbreaks in Nashville and Omaha and Wichita, but they’re not going to drive the sorts of numbers IHME is projecting. Or anywhere close.
The problem with the first possibility, a resurgence in areas that have already been hit, is also simple: once burned, twice shy. You can not only see the minuscule recent death toll in places like NY, NJ, and CT that got clobbered in the first wave, but in the current decline in the death rates in the second-wave states like Florida, where they’re still averaging 100 deaths/day, but it was more like 170 just three weeks ago: even in states governed by the open-it-up crowd, the state governments at least do some sort of mildly useful response, and enough people living there start realizing this could kill them, and act accordingly.
I’m sure there will be some sort of third wave this fall, mostly due to colleges and K-12 schools reopening. But such reopenings have been far from universal, so it’s hard to see how their effects can be anywhere near massive enough to generate the numbers IHME is predicting.
Right now, the 7-day average is at about 850 deaths per day. If we stayed at that level through the rest of the year, we’d get another 100,000 deaths by the end of the year. My WAG is that the death rate will keep dropping for awhile (it had been over 1000/day for most of August), then go back up again with a third wave that’s partly the 'rona reaching smaller cities that haven’t been hit hard, and partly the school effect, then down again by year’s end. I’d guess total deaths by year’s end will be ~300K. But not 400K, not even close.
I think the models overall have proven that the unknowns of the inputs make running the models not of much value.
On the one end - we could have a moderate COVID-19 surge (especially in areas not yet hit very much) along with a moderate influenza season, far overwhelming system capacities … huge excess deaths as there is no room at the inn.
Or the mitigation behaviors in place succeed in keeping COVID-19 low and also prevent much of a flu season, the whole thing ends up a non-event.
No one knows which to assume.
In the words of Dirty Harry -