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Michael Donnelly

@donnellymjd

, 6 tweets, 3 min read

My Authors

(1/) Five days ago I forecast that NYC’s hospitals would be at capacity with #coronavirus cases by Mar 30. I was wrong. New data suggest that #NYC’s hospitals will reach capacity of approx. 3,000 cases by Mar 24. #shutdownNYC
medium.com/@donnellymjd/c…

(2/) While there is now nothing we can do to prevent reaching capacity short of immediately adding beds, we can prevent additional deaths and hospitalizations by fully shutting down NYC except for absolutely essential services, like Italy’s current restrictions.

(3/) Why was the first forecast wrong by a few days? Detection rate. In the prior worst case scenario, we assumed an overall detection rate of 18%, which implied fewer undetected cases. New hospitalization data imply an estimated detection rate of just 5.6% today.

@NYGovCuomo

@NYGovCuomo

(4/) Yes, #NY has increased testing at a rapid rate, unfortunately it barely closed any ground with the rapidly spreading #COVID19. The only chance our hospitals have is that @NYGovCuomo #shutdownNYC and give them a fighting chance to save NYers.

(5/) We can't wait any longer. The forecast model suggests we will add approximately ~24k new infections TOMORROW. (Perhaps just +1k-2k newly confirmed cases). At a 2% mortality rate, that means ~480 new people will die by the end of this. Every hour we wait will cost ~20 lives.