Coronavirus deaths projected to hit 3,000 per day by June, internal Trump administration analysis says
The near term spikes of infections and deaths are due to modification of the predictive models to include significant rollback of mitigating measures.
But the long run is what it is.
Once in a while for weeks and months we have heard the overwhelming majority of Americans would eventually be infected, and between 2 and 4 percent of the infected would die.
Now we are hearing the lethality could be much lower, and we have to hope that is so.
Because seventy percent of 320,000,000 is 224,000,000, and a 3 % mortality means 6,720,000 dead.
And people now are openly admitting the damage to the economy we have done by lockdown already is more than the US can recover from in decades, despite White House happy talk.
More often we hear it said we are in for an uninterrupted two year pandemic.
One might still argue that lockdown clearly does delay spread of the disease and pushes off the deaths into the future.
Well, push them off far enough and we'll get one or more good vaccines and use of them will actually decrease the total number ultimately killed by this bug.
Too, rollback - particularly rollback without real monitoring of the extent or spread of the disease, which is what we are going to get - will soon overwhelm the hospital system.
And that will mean excess deaths both among Coronavirus victims for lack of care and among all the others, the heart cases, the cancer cases, the usual daily run of life and death cases, who will also die in excess numbers for lack of care.
All that excess death is avoided, too, by continuing the lockdown.
But are vaccines too far off?
And the continuing damage to the economy is going to result in another kind of excess deaths for years and decades to come.
Too many for lockdown to be worthwhile, even if the price of rollback is overwhelming the hospitals and causing all those horrific excess deaths for lack of care?
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