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
Will these numbers be right? They do not have to be. People will argue over the assumptions used. I have some scientists tell me it’s the best we have. Others will say too conservative. Everyone will acknowledge we just don’t know.
Former CDC head Dr. Tom Frieden, who I served with, said the most important thing we need to be doing is learning. He’s frustrated we aren’t collecting a lot more data. But we will get much better studies. More importantly, this is what you might call a focusing moment for the country. That means every scientist, every factory, every genius, every philanthropist will be working on this. And they are. Hackathons, new tests, new models, they will all emerge.
We don’t have enough ventilators? Smart people will figure out how to make more. They already are. Don’t have enough masks? Every factory in the country will be on it. The Defense Production Act will clear the way.
You will keep hearing about new problems. They will sound endless. But someone will figure out a new way. Right now we are in the “holy shit, we didn’t plan for this stage.” We will move to the “we are all over this fucking virus” stage.
We launched yesterday a “Raise your hand COVID-19” initiative rather quietly yesterday. Looking for supply chain experts, technologists, data scientists, other experts to go work in the state governments, federal government, and White House. In the first half a day of a Google Doc circulating, fifty people signed up. I called one person at 8:30am in New York. At 9:15am he called me from his car on the way to the White House. Last night one of my former employees texted me from the White House. Newly married, they left New York and went to DC.
Some of the smartest people I know, some of the most capable, and some of the wealthiest, are doing nothing but working on this problem.
People are stepping up for vaccine tests, more testing production and new types of tests. This will all happen but it depends on a big thing: Trump needs to come clean with the public that this is an 18 month effort, not a quick fire-drill. And Congress needs to it the $4 trillion behind this.
In the meantime, we will have a fire-drill. This is a text from a governor I got late last night.
We don’t have what we need for the short term and that puts all the pressure on #StayHome. Hard to communicate how important this is. The short run will be bad. The short run will be very bad if we don’t save our health care system from the onslaught.
