Good News: Coronavirus Death Estimates Keep Shrinking

One of the most striking developments over the past two weeks is how quickly the estimates of death and hospitalizations from COVID-19 are being reduced...

The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is the most influential modeler of the novel coronavirus in the United States, with White House officials and other public health professionals using the group's numbers to plan strategy and policy. On March 26, IHME predicted that if current social-distancing policies stayed in place, there would likely be 81,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States by June 1. In its most recent projection, from April 8, it concluded that there would 60,145 deaths, a figure, as Fareed Zakaria writes in The Washington Post, "on par with the number of people estimated to have died of the flu in the 2019-2020 season."

National Review's Andrew McCarthy notes that IHME has been revising its estimates for hospital beds (including ones in intensive care units [ICU]) and ventilators as well: On April 8, IHME reduced the total number of hospital beds it had predicted would be needed nationally by a remarkable 166,890—down to 95,202 from the 262,092 it had predicted less than a week earlier (i.e., it was nearly two-thirds off).

The ICU projection over that same week was cut in half: to 19,816 on April 8, down from 39,727 on April 2. The projected need for ventilators also fell by nearly half, to 16,845 from 31,782...

On March 30, University of Washington researchers projected that California would need 4,800 beds on April 3. In fact, the state needed 2,200. The same model projected that Louisiana would need 6,400; in fact, it used only 1,700. Even New York, the most stressed system in the country, used only 15,000 beds against a projection of 58,000.

Governments at all levels have pointed to dire forecasts (remember the CDC's worst-case scenario of 1.7 million deaths?) to lock down the economy, which has shrunk by 30 percent over the past month, and to help pass historically high spending bills. Residents in Kentucky and other states who are diagnosed with or suspected of having COVID-19 are being tracked using ankle bracelets and other invasive technologies. Faulty projections of the need for hospital resources "has meant that patients with other pressing illnesses might have been denied care—or not sought care—for no good reason," writes Zakaria.

In short, we have completely upended American society on the basis on projections and descriptions that are unstable and inaccurate. There's no question that the estimated fatality rate and need for hospital beds are coming down partly because of social distancing and other changes in behavior. But some portion of the slippage in the IHME numbers is surely because the models, which presume social-distancing rules stay in place, are flawed.

More on forecasts and reality:

More than a dozen researchers predicted how the US's coronavirus outbreak will end. They estimated nearly 200,000 people could die by the end of the year....The most extreme model predicted that up to 1.2 million people could die. By comparison, a typical flu season in the US kills between 11,000 and 95,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. .. But a model from the Imperial College of London estimated up to 2.2 million people could die if no actions were taken to stop transmission in the US...The disease modeler who conducted the survey, Thomas McAndrew, said he didn't ask researchers to account for social-distancing measures in their models, but researchers still had the option...But the Imperial College researchers also said three months of social-distancing measures — such as household quarantines, closures of all schools and universities, and the isolation of infected patients — could cut the number of US deaths in half. Even if all patients were able to receive treatment at hospitals, however, the researchers predicted that about 1.2 million people in the US could die. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-deaths-us-predictions-social-distancing-2020-3

White House Projects 100,000 to 240,000 U.S. Coronavirus Deaths ‘This could be a hell of a bad two weeks,’ Trump warns, urging Americans to continue social-distancing measures https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-coronavirus-count-excluded-infected-people-with-no-symptoms-11585650226

With Strict Social Distancing, U.S. COVID-19 Deaths May Total 100,000 March 30, 20207:16 AM ET Heard on Morning Edition https://www.npr.org/2020/03/30/823764157/with-strict-social-distancing-u-s-covid-19-deaths-may-total-100-000

The Imperial College model famously predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. in a do-nothing scenario, and more than 1 million even if quite aggressive mitigation measures were adopted. As of April 2, a survey of public-health officials summarized by FiveThirtyEight found a median projection of around 263,000 deaths. The new IHME model suggests an ultimate toll less than one-quarter that number, about one-20th the figure projected in the Imperial College’s “mitigation” scenario, and less than one-30th what was projected in their “do nothing” scenario. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/best-case-scenario-for-coronavirus.html

Fauci lowers U.S. coronavirus death forecast to 60,000, says social distancing is working Dan Keemahill, Erin Mansfield, Dinah Voyles Pulver, Nicholas Wu, Dian Zhang, USA TODAY 6 days ago https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fauci-lowers-us-coronavirus-death-forecast-to-60000-says-social-distancing-is-working/ar-BB12oHEl

The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Spread To Millions In The US. We Don’t Have Nearly Enough Hospital Beds If It Does. Models suggest that the US could be headed toward 150,000 COVID-19 cases by the end of the month, with only 45,000 ICU hospital beds nationwide. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/coronavirus-hospital-beds-icu

These Places Could Run Out of Hospital Beds as Coronavirus Spreads. March 17, 2020

In 40 percent of markets around the country, hospitals would not be able to make enough room for all the patients who became ill with Covid-19, even if they could empty their beds of other patients. That statistic assumes that 40 percent of adults become infected with the virus over 12 months, a scenario described as “moderate” by the team behind the calculations. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/upshot/hospital-bed-shortages-coronavirus.html

(See OP article above on hospitalizations)

NEXT: No, NYC Is Not Running Out of Burial Space Due to COVID-19

Is California winning the battle against coronavirus spread? April 14, 2020 ...Gov. Gavin Newsom’s health agency provided The Bee with perhaps the most telling numbers yet that the state is staving off the surge of serious cases that overwhelmed hospitals in New York, China, Italy and Spain....If those numbers remain low, they will be far under projections from Newsom’s office that indicated the state would need to add more than 50,000 hospital beds to accommodate a surge in COVID-19 patients. So far in California, there have been more than 22,000 confirmed cases and 687 deaths, according to the latest data from the California Department of Public Health. https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article241973806.html

Actually, from basic virology and epidemiology, the only thing that stops a viral outbreak is . .. here d immunity, which is a means of denying the virus hosts who it can infect and replicate and spread once again....

So, by social distancing, the only thing accomplished is delaying the spread to some degree. Eventually, either the virus infects susceptible hosts and immunity ensues, reducing the spread until infection rate drips below the reproductive rate needed to sustain the spread....

I believe many Americans have already been exposed and infected and immunized, the govt has no real idea of that rate/%. Most viruses herd immunity rate is from 30-70% of a population.

The old fashioned quarantine was effective for n stopping spread by eliminating a host population, thereby stopping reproduction and access to new hosts.

Let’s protect vulnerable groups, and the rest of our economy can get working....

This episode is the green new deal by any other flavor, dependency on stimulus package money.

Exactly right.

The early models were wrong because good data was scarce — mainly because China lied.

The models being used by the Coronavirus Task Force, over the past several weeks, were much closer to the mark. As more data has become available, the model improved accordingly. Anyone could follow the projections online, and they have been remarkably accurate for the past couple of weeks.

Now that we have more accurate data (and testing will produce much more), it will be possible to validate the models, by plugging the accurate data into them. The model for the ‘do-nothing’ scenario (using good data), could then be compared with the actual results; to get a fairly good estimate of the number of lives the mitigation efforts saved. If, they find (say) a difference of 150,000 deaths, between the model and the actuals — that would strongly suggest that the mitigation efforts saved 150,000 lives. It would not prove the models were wrong — it would prove that the measures Trump put in place saved a great many lives.

Some posters here can’t seem to understand the concept. They’re acting like the stereotype of Trump supporters propogated by the MSM, etc. It’s disappointing.

not only was Neil Ferguson/Imperial College London wrong. Ferguson has almost always been wrong.

behind paywall. found a couple of extra, incomplete bits re swine flu & bird flu, where he was extremely WRONG;

16 Apr: Spectator UK: Steerpike: Six questions that Neil Ferguson should be asked
It was a tale of two interviews on the Today programme (BBC) this morning. First up on the show was Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, who has been instrumental in forming the UK government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, and whose virus modelling led to the current lockdown being put in place.
On the show, the professor received an almost deferential line of questioning from Sarah Smith with his views seemingly taken as near-Gospel as he declared that a ‘significant level’ of social distancing could have to be maintained indefinitely until a vaccine becomes available...

In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could be killed from bird flu...
In 2009, Ferguson and his Imperial team predicted that swine flu had a case fatality rate 0.3 per cent to 1.5 per cent...
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/six-questions-that-neil-ferguson-should-be-asked

30 Mar: The Australian: Coronavirus: Questions over modelling behind UK’s strict restrictions
By Jacquelin Magnay
His name is forever tainted with a seriously flawed forecast about foot and mouth disease that resulted in the unnecessary slaughter of millions of livestock that saw pyres burning across Britain and cost farmers their livelihoods.
That was in 2001, and now the man who convinced then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to take such extreme action to handle the foot and mouth outbreak is behind Imperial College data that the UK government is relying on to inflict the most extreme social isolation measures in the coronavirus pandemic.

Professor Neil Ferguson heads an Imperial College, London team that has claimed 510,000 people in the UK would die from coronavirus if nothing was done, and by introducing various distancing measures, the curve could be flattened so as few as 20,000 people would die.
Given Professor Ferguson’s unquestionable influence on UK action, and possibly by extension Australia’s two-person social distancing policy that came into effect overnight, his numbers are being carefully scrutinised by others...

Another professor, Michael Thrusfield of Edinburgh University has claimed Professor Ferguson’s “severely flawed’’ errors 19 years ago led to the cull of more than six million animals that did not need to die. Another government study also found Professor Ferguson and his team at Imperial College used models during the foot and mouth crisis that “were not suitable for predicting the course of the epidemic and the effects of control measures. The models also remain not validated. Their use to predict the effects of control strategies was therefore imprudent.”
The same Professor Ferguson predicted as many as 69,000 deaths from swine flu in 2009 when only a few hundred (342 in UK) died...

Another critic of the Imperial College study is John Ioannidis, a professor in disease prevention at Stanford University. He told The Telegraph UK: “The Imperial College study has been done by a highly competent team of modellers. However, some of the major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations seem to be substantially inflated.”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/coronavirus-questions-over-modelling-behind-strict-restrictions/news-story/e6b928a4587119ad63b15e3af249ddf7

nonetheless, UK Govt and FakeNewsMSM is still promoting his opinions!

16 Apr: BBC: Coronavirus: Significant social distancing needed ‘until vaccine found’
Prof Neil Ferguson (professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London) told the BBC there was “little leeway” to relax measures without “something... in their place” - such as testing and contact tracing...
It comes as the UK recorded another 861 coronavirus deaths, taking the total number of hospital deaths to 13,729...
Meanwhile, more than nine in 10 people dying with coronavirus have an underlying health condition, analysis by the Office for National Statistics has found (LINK)...

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Prof Ferguson, of Imperial College London, said easing the lockdown after another three weeks would depend on “how quickly case numbers go down”.
He said that required “a single-minded emphasis” in government and the health system on “scaling up testing and putting in place the ability to track down cases in the community and contact trace”...

BBC health correspondent James Gallagher said if a vaccine were to be found, it was not expected that manufacturers would be able to mass produce it until the second half of 2021.
“Remember, there are four coronaviruses that already circulate in human beings. They cause the common cold, and we don’t have vaccines for any of them,” he said...

Prof Ferguson said he believed the “daily number of infections peaked two weeks ago”, but said it was “too early to relax”...
There are more than 10,000 beds on general wards available and another 2,000 spaces in intensive care...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52308201

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