The governors of Texas and Iowa will soon be rewarded for their reopening efforts with a visit to the White House this week.
Trump out here moving the goalposts on coronavirus deaths like an auctioneer pic.twitter.com/nb6Eo92MYJ
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 4, 2020
TPM Reader KM tells us in the subject line of her email that she writes from Detroit …
My own experience of the pandemic is of something that was very distant and abstract up till the moment I was in the thick of it. So my turning point is more like a breaking point: the experience that split my life into a Before and a Now.
TPM Reader WC (not his real initials) is an emergency room doctor on the West Coast. His turning point is different from many of our who haven’t been on the front lines of the epidemic.
Like many of you listeners, I too saw the closure of schools and the cancellation of the NCAA championship/NBA season as big turning points. The other turning point for me was the day I walked into our ER at a large trauma center and it was totally empty, which is unheard of.
One of the most depressing and least surprising developments in the last 36 hours is that the White House is apparently relying on a “cubic model” of the COVID19 epidemic prepared by White House economist Kevin Hassett to craft its crisis response. I have not seen any statisticians or epidemiologists who know precisely what “cubic” refers to the in this context – though there are some promising speculations based on simply plugging in one of the default trend lines (third degree polynomial) in Microsoft Excel. The more relevant point is that, according to The Washington Post, the model predicts the number of people dying of COVID19 in the US will fall to close to zero by May 15th – a scenario that seems all but impossible.
Here I can’t help but note a basic point. Hassett is not a health care economist, let alone someone at the crossroads of behavioral economics and epidemiologists. Indeed, his record as an economist is rather notorious.
As you may have sensed from my writing over the last two months I’m if anything a COVID19 pessimist. I have generally thought things would be worse than the consensus opinion anticipated. Unfortunately, I’ve generally been right. But let me strike a different note about this CDC model or forecast that has gotten all the news today. The numbers are stunning. And from a purely non-expert viewpoint they don’t seem credible. I put this forward purely on the basis of being very immersed in the current statistics and having at least some sense of how trends work.
Let me try to explain.
Since the beginning of the COVID19 epidemic in the United States it’s been clear that there’s no single epidemic in the United States. There is more a series of urban and regional epidemics unfolding at different times and with different intensities. To a degree this is true for every country. But it is especially so for the US since the country is so large, both in terms of geography and population. More specifically or at least for now there is a New York epidemic and the rest of the country.
In the Trump administration, officials are more likely to dig their heels into errors than admit any level of wrongdoing.
From TPM Reader AL …
My dad turned 80 on March 8th. I was already concerned about the coronavirus’s inevitable arrival, in no small part due to your excellent coverage, and it was in the back of my mind that he should cancel or postpone his birthday party and, if it wasn’t such a milestone, I might have pushed harder for it. But I didn’t, and I attended his party. Most of his friends were north of 70 and many of them weren’t taking the threat seriously (some of them wouldn’t for weeks after and at least one still doesn’t).
From TPM Reader Anon …
I would say my COVID-19 turning point was January 25, 2020. I had also been following what was going on in Wuhan, but then saw a post at dKos by a member who goes by the name of AKALib. The post was titled “Wuhan Coronavirus – An Update, Prognosis and Projections”. It listed 18 countries that the virus was in, including 5 cases in the U.S. The post included clear graphs showing exponential growth of cases, and statements by virologists: