From The BulwarkPandemic ReminderI know it's hard to keep track of, with everything going on, but there is still a pandemic.
Every six days right now, COVID-19 is killing about as many Americans as were killed on 9/11.
And this week our official death toll surpassed the number of U.S. dead in World War 1.
It's very hard to get our arms around what the real state of play is on the virus. Looking at numbers of confirmed new infections is a function of testing, as well as infection rates. Looking at number of hospitalizations is a function of behavior and availability.
My view is that the death totals are the best metric to watch in terms of having a real view of the virus. The drawback is that deaths don't give you a view of where we are right now. They're the after image of where we were two to four weeks ago.
Anyway, the death numbers have continued to trend in the right direction, though the curve has been shallower than we'd hoped.
This is, relatively speaking, good news. Deaths going down is better than deaths going up.
But at this point we're on track to have a preliminary death total—and remember, this number will almost certainly go up by a large percentage when in-depth accounting is done in the coming months—that's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 140,000 by the end of the summer.
One of the things we've done is constantly reset our sense of what is "normal" or "acceptable" over the last six months. Back when the total number of dead was 100, there were people yammering on about how it was obvious that Trump had handled COVID-19 better than Obama had handled H1-N1, because just look, only 100 people were dead!
If you had carried a report back to these people from 20 weeks in the future proving that 120,000 Americans would be dead and asked them what they thought about it, I suspect most of those people would have had their heads explode.
But we are where we are and so people have gotten used to the idea, like the frogs in the boiling water.
It turns out that the models were more or less in the ballpark even though the epidemiologists were working with wildly incomplete information and changing habits of behavior. The Imperial College model on deaths minus mitigation efforts now seems pretty reasonable based on the number of dead even with intense mitigation.
And the University of Washington's IMHE model that everyone mocked? Its first projection in late March was 161,000 dead.
That's pretty close to the pin.
Meanwhile, the people insisting that the coronavirus was no big deal, that it was nothing worse than the flu, that the death total wouldn't even hit five digits—they were wrong.
Wildly, completely, fully-verifiably wrong. . . .
