Some of the Smartest People I Know, Are Doing Nothing But Working on This Problem

A daily Covid-19 update from Andy Slavitt, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Pulled from my daily COVID-19 updates on Twitter.

Today I may do two posts because so much is happening. This one contains a lot of positive things happening. But in order to get there we need to be grounded in what he scientists & mathematicians are saying. And it’s disturbing.

A lot of the talk today is about the Imperial College paper that came out March 16 with some very dire analysis. This deserves some explanation. But know I’m a layman & so this comes from scientists I’ve talked to.

First take a deep breath and understand that this is a “novel” disease. We have very very little data on it. So view this as a look at how we think the game is likely to end at nine innings from the point of view of the first inning. To keep up with this dumb analogy, we may be down 4 runs but we have all kinds of hitters, batters, coaching maneuvers, trick plays, and other things.

With that as back drop, what does the study say? It basically does math assuming what we know from Italy and China and South Korea which shows the growth in cases being exponential, exposure rates, and death rates and lays it out for the US.

The point that seems to have widespread agreement, is we are in for an 18 month haul. It suggests through different scenarios that somewhere between 500 thousand and 4 million Americans will die. That is just math and the range reflects how many people each person infects.

Most of the deaths would be in the older & chronic populations. Now wipe the numbers from your brain. They are useless to us. Just understand that whatever the numbers:

• The more extremely we #StayHome and isolate, the fewer deaths
• Absolutely isolate every at-risk loved one