Disasters in Slow Motion (pt. 8) - Apr 11, 2020

April 4 (14:44 GMT) - Actual Numbers
Worldwide Cases: 1,726,977
Worldwide Deaths: 61,205 deaths
US Cases: 279,500 cases
US Deaths: 7,457 deaths

April 11 (00:21 GMT) - Actual Numbers
Worldwide Cases: 1,141,425
Worldwide Deaths: 104,923 deaths
US Cases: 506,008 cases
US Deaths: 18,883 deaths

The math continues to hold up. Two weeks ago I predicted we would hit 250,000 by last Friday, last Friday I predicted we would cross the 500k mark by yesterday. Sadly, yes to both. This shows that, while Covid cases may be slowing down in some places we really don’t have as good of a handle on it as we might hope.

1. Certainly, more cases are uncovered as the US has finally stepped up its testing efforts. This will help bring down the final mortality number towards something closer to factual. Currently the global mortality rate is at 6.07% while in the US it is at 3.73%. I would credit that lower number to better testing in the US than overall worldwide. If compared with the country with one of the best testing per capita ratings (South Korea) we have a number of 2.01%. Now, these aren’t quite apples to apples comparisons - but they give us a much better idea of what the virus is actually doing. The more cases we find, the less horrific that mortality rate looks. More on that in a bit.
2. The downside is all these unknown cases we are discovering may well have been spreading it further than we feared. Which means that we don’t have this under control, and in many places it still may be spreading like wildfire. The fact is that a great number of people (including State governments) are not taking this seriously enough. Las Vegas is already talking about the possibility of reopening May 1st while some states haven’t even put shelter in place into effect yet.

Meanwhile, plague rats like domestic terrorist Ammon Bundy are planning mass gatherings and mega churches are moving forward with services rather than lose that Easter collection plate money. Of course other militia nutjobs? They are taking this seriously...and are even trying to help out. To them all I can say is, welcome back to the human race. If you like it here, maybe stay for a while.

Now there has been an animated meme going around that compares Covid-19 to the leading causes of death in the United States. Its pretty interesting information but, as my friend Jeff Carey pointed out, it isn’t accurate and isrefuted by the CDC. That refutation is accurate based on the way the CDC does their numbers, and by home the meme uses those numbers to find an average.

According to the CDC, in 2018, more than 234,000 people in the United States died of heart disease. Now, since I don’t have a reasonable figure for “more” at the moment, I’ll just use that 234,000 figure. That translates to an average of roughly 641 people per day for all of 2018. Now, our daily fatalities have certainly surpassed that with over 2000 people dying yesterday. As a leading cause of death for a specific day? Covid-19 is winning for a handful of days. But, what about for the month of April? Let’s look at up to April 10th (where we have complete numbers)

April Heart Disease Averaged Deaths: 641 x 10 - 6,410 deaths
April Covid-19 Actual Deaths: 18,747 (April 10) - 3,850 (March 31) = 14,897

So, we can even see that Covid-19 deaths have certainly surpassed heart disease deaths in April. If we wanted to stretch the average to be March and April, Covid-19 would still be in first place. HOWEVER, that would be a misleading way of looking at things, because of the massive amount of deaths in April. This is where the CDC starts having a bone to pick - and rightfully so.

We will need to maintain our current rate of newly reported deaths (2,035) for approximately 108 more days to surpass heart disease the way that the CDC reckons these things. With luck and a lot of good science, we can all hope that doesn’t happen.

So, those figures are all about the longer term, what about the short term? It looks like the daily death numbers have hopefully come close to their peak. The numbers will go up a bit more as people who have been in care for the longest begin to die, but it looks like we may be within a week or so of the highest numbers - unless idiots like Ammon Bundy screw it up for us. What those high numbers will be, I have zero idea and I don’t know the math to really calculate it.

Our increase in reported cases however, it isn’t showing signs of slowing down yet - and as testing continues - it won’t. But I don’t know as reported numbers can continue to accelerate at the rate they did over the last week simply due to testing availability. With that in mind, while the numbers are at a scale that would put us on track for 1M cases by Friday, I feel that the reported number will be lower - 750,000 or so - based on the short period of actual testing numbers I have. On April 5 we had a total of 1,632,955 tests administered so roughly 19% of those tested were infected. The April 10 figures are 2,538,888 so in the past five days roughly 180,000 tests have been administered per day. If the rate of positives remains the same, we’ll show 34,200 new cases per day as a maximum - and the fed is already talking about backing off a bit on testing.

I believe that, if testing quadrupled we could hit over 1M cases by Friday. I just feel that to be wholly unrealistic - the fact is that we cannot test fast enough to keep up the exponential spread of this virus - period. The US numbers were artificially low for a long time due to lack of testing, now they will continue to be inaccurate because we cannot keep up. Since we cannot, I’m assuming that we’ll hit 750,000 confirmed cases.

In the time I took to write this, the US has reported 783 new deaths.