Coronavirus: The Wrong Numbers
Will the media ever admit the failure of doomsday projections? spectator.org/coronavirus-th…
Will the media ever admit the failure of doomsday projections? spectator.org/coronavirus-th…
urn on your TV, and cable news will show you a chyron with the cumulative total of known COVID-19 cases in the United States. That number increases daily, by a simple process of addition, but that’s not the number which matters most in terms of coping with the pandemic.
What matters, from the perspective of avoiding a crisis that overwhelms our health-care system, is not how many people are infected with the coronavirus, but rather the number of patients hospitalized.
As tests for the Chinese virus have become more widely available, a majority of people who test positive — more than 80 percent in some states — are never hospitalized.
Earlier projections of a system-crashing crisis have so far been proven false, but the media refuse to acknowledge the failure of the doomsday prophets and their computer-generated pandemic models.
More than 1,300 Americans died from the virus Saturday, concluding a week in which U.S. deaths totaled 6,232. Next week’s coronavirus death toll will almost certainly be much larger;
the progression of the disease takes time, and patients who die typically were infected 2 or 3 weeks earlier. However, AT LEAST 95% of those infected survive — in some states, the death rate is less than 2% — and most people with the virus never require hospitalization.
Since March 25, Florida conducted more than 6,000 coronavirus tests daily; more than 65,000 people were tested in Florida during a single week, March 28-April 3. More testing means more cases are identified, Q.E.D.
However, of those who tested positive (about 12%), very few were hospitalized. As of Sunday, Florida had reported 11,545 cases of COVID-19, but only 1,490 were hospitalized with the disease (12.3%) and there were 218 reported deaths — a death rate of 1.8%.
We cannot presume to know what will happen in the future, but so far, America’s coronavirus outbreak has been less deadly than in Italy, where the reported fatality rate has exceeded 12%.
Even the states with higher fatality rates, including Washington State, Michigan, and Louisiana, are about 70 percent below the reported death rates in Italy.
And even as case numbers nationally keep rising — past 330,000 Sunday, with more than 30,000 new cases reported — these numbers are lagging behind projections issued in late March by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at University of Washington’s School of Medicine.
The so-called “Murray model,” named for the IHME’s director Dr. Christopher Murray, made headlines after a March 29 White House briefing, at which President Trump announced he would extend federal “social distancing” guidelines through April 30.
The president’s coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx cited Murray’s projection of “between 80,000 and 160,000” deaths from the pandemic.
Birx made the point that the IHME projection assumed that current “mitigation” strategies — stay-at-home orders, etc. — would continue for many more weeks.
The Murray model was the basis for local news headlines like “New models predict Texas COVID-19 deaths could reach over 4,000” (KEYE-TV, Austin) and “Coronavirus: Deaths in Florida projected to hit 6,766 by August” (Florida Times-Union).
Within days, however, observers pointed out that actual case numbers were not confirming the IHME projections.
Whereas the Murray model had predicted more than 100,000 hospitalizations by April 1, the states reported only about 30,000. State-by-state comparisons yielded similar gaps:
New York had only 18,000 COVID-19 patients hospitalized on April 1, compared to more than 50,000 projected for that date by the Murray model. In some states, the gap was much larger, i.e., 2,500-plus projected vs. about 500 actually hospitalized in Colorado.
If these projections were missing the mark so badly less than a week after they were issued, how could anyone trust IHME model forecasts of what the patient load would be in mid-April or later?
This is a very important question because, for example, when you turn on the TV and see New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo warning of a shortage of ICU beds and ventilators to treat coronavirus patients, he’s speaking of an anticipated future shortage, based upon the predicted trajectory
Cuomo is concerned about whether his state’s hospitals will have the necessary resources to cope with the patient load at what he calls the “apex” of the “curve.”
According to the Murray model’s late-March forecast, as many as 75,000 patients would be hospitalized in New York by April 11, the predicted “apex.” During his Sunday briefing, however, Cuomo acknowledged that the “curve” already appears to have reached a “plateau.”
Hospital admissions for COVID-19 decreased from 1,095 new patients Friday to 574 on Saturday, and new ICU admissions also declined, while the number of patients discharged went up, from 1,502 Friday to 1,709 Saturday.
As of Sunday, 16,479 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized in New York, which is about 22 percent of what the IHME model projected as the “apex” peak on April 11.
While a sudden surge in cases cannot be ruled out — we can’t predict the future course of the outbreak — it now seems unlikely that New York’s hospital load will ever reach what the model predicted in late March.
While the cumulative totals of cases and deaths continue rising, the media are doing a lousy job of reporting the most important numbers: How many COVID-19 patients are currently hospitalized?
How many new patients are admitted to the hospital each day, and how many patients are discharged? The reason for “social distancing” policies was to slow the spread of the disease, to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic and avoid overwhelming the hospital system.
We have reason to believe that these policies are succeeding in that regard, and something else may explain why we may be averting the “apex” crisis: Chloroquine.
The anti-malarial drug which Trump famously touted as a “game-changer” in the fight against coronavirus is now being prescribed to thousands of patients, and anecdotal reports indicate that the drug is effective.
The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations may have been reduced by this treatment and, if so, chloroquine was probably a variable not factored into the models that projected a shortage of ventilators and ICU beds.
