As a non-expert I’ve struggled over the last week or so to make sense of the status of the pandemic in the United States, but overnight a top expert laid things out in as clear a way as I’ve seen in a while. You probably know Jeremy Konyndyk as a disaster preparedness expert who served in the Obama administration and has since become a prominent voice on the U.S. COVID-19 response.
His rundown of why things aren’t getting dramatically worse but also aren’t getting any better helps pull together the various contributing factors to the brutal daily death toll at which we seem to have plateaued. By his own admission, it is not an optimistic assessment.
There is a common aphorism in the world of statistics: ‘All models are wrong but some are useful.’ It captures an important point: Models aren’t predictions as a psychic might make so much as attempts to organize data and think critically about uncertainty. The COVID19 model out of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has become something of a canonical model for the COVID19 epidemic in the United States, in part because it appears to have been adopted by the White House task force. I wanted to take a moment to look at just how far out of line it has become even with current data.
The models estimates have bounced around a fair amount. It started high, jumped back considerably and has crept back up since. This isn’t a sign of a problem in itself. It is an attempt to model the course of a disease that didn’t exist six months ago. As we proceed it is supplemented with new data.
But consider these numbers. The latest estimate, released on April 29th projected 72,433 cumulative deaths through August 4th – a range from 59,343 to 114,228. But as of this morning the Johns Hopkins University data tracker shows that 63,019 people have already died. And if we look at the data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project 13,252 of those have died (or at least been reported) in the last seven days.
This is a tweet from Xinhua News Service, the official state news service of the People’s Republic of China. Give it a look and then a few thoughts after the jump.
this is amazing on many levels https://t.co/tpKnPTAWeo
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 30, 2020
Three different outlets published their own version of the same story: President Trump is not happy with his campaign manager Brad Parscale.
Over the last week to ten days a wealth of new information has come to light about ‘excess mortality’ in the COVID19 Crisis. My last major installment in this series was back on April 15th when I pulled together preliminary data from a number of countries in Europe and compared them to the emerging data from New York City. As we discussed back in March, the basic formula is the same everywhere: collect data on average mortality in recent years, compare it to the total number of deaths over the same calendar dates this year and then subtract the official COVID19 death toll numbers from that “excess” amount. You are left with an approximate number which captures the true mortality levels, the true number of people who died, because of the COVID19 Crisis and the difference between the ‘true’ number and the official numbers we’ve grappled with in recent weeks.
Risk your health to return to work or lose your unemployment benefits.
TPM Reader PK follows up on reopening …
I was struck by reader JL’s comments and your statement that, “We shouldn’t assume that the states that are in the process of opening up will quickly see dramatic resurgences or outbreaks. There’s a lot of complexity under the hood distinguishing one state’s plan from another.”
I think that’s exactly right and it is why I was so disturbed by a NYTimes opinion piece that ran this weekend from Brown University President Christina Paxson. It offered a bold plan to reopen college campuses around the country by the fall, talking about changes ranging from keeping large classes online to wearing masks and minimizing large gatherings.
In a widely-read column in The New York Post the Chair of Emergency Medicine at St Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx says it’s time to reopen the city. Though I disagree with him, as someone who has worked in an emergency room through the crisis and contracted COVID19 himself, Daniel Murphy has plenty of standing to share his opinion. I note the piece for a more particular reason though. Murphy says that 43% of Bronx residents have been infected with COVID19. He doesn’t say where he gets that number and he doesn’t say explicitly that he’s talking about antibodies testing. But context makes the latter point pretty clear and he must be drawing this from the serology testing the state has been doing over the last two weeks.
A few days ago I mentioned that if you took an observer from 2016 and showed her President Trump’s tweets today they’d think something had gone seriously wrong with the man. Yes, he was all the bad things in 2016. Almost everything that has happened connected to him was predictable. Much of it was in fact predicted. But the affect, the garbled speech, the dipping into vocabulary of Internet hate speech groups, it’s all much wilder and antic than the version we saw four years ago. But as I wrote this I noticed something different.