Thread by @YossiGestetner

1/ The following is not a critique on @NYGovCuomo or his senior staff. They need to run a state with 20 million people and multi layers of government but someone - with too much time on his hand (ya that’s me) - needs to ask questions and someone needs to answer them too.

2/18 Today three weeks ago, Sunday March 22, Cuomo said that NY will reach Apex in 14-21 days (which would be April 6-13) and NY will need 125K beds; including 30,000 ICUs. Understand that a week earlier Sunday, he ordered schools shut and gradually he shut down the rest of NY.

3/18 Basically, shutdown policies were rooted in those dark projections. But about ten days later (end of March), as the ICU count did not rise quick enough to reach 30,000 by April 6-13, Cuomo said he expects the apex to hit end of April. Just like that, his data people pushed

4/18 back the apex by more than two weeks rather than stopping a moment to see why their projections won’t come true by a mile. The following week, early last week, Cuomo said the bed need will be 20K - 30K and the ICUs way less than expected. Cool. At the same time (late March

5/18 and into early April), @IHME_UW projected NY to need 10,900 ICUs by Thursday April 2 and when it did not happen they projected that a week later (April 8-9), NY will need almost 12,000 ICUs. The White House is relying on IHME so my guess is Cuomo in large part too.

6/18 Understand that when Cuomo said March 22 that we will need 30K ICU in 2-3 weeks (and days later IHME had their projections for early April), this is how the ICU rose

756 Mon 3/23/20

888 Tuesday 3/24

1,583 Thur 3/26

1,755 Fri

2,037 Sat

2,352 Sun 3/29

2,719 Mon 3/30

(ICU count continued)

3,022 Tuesday 3/31

3,396 Wed 4/1

3,731 Thurs 4/2

4,126 Fri 4/3

4,376 Sat 4/4

4,504 Sun 4/5

4,583 Mon 4/6.

As you can see, for the governor’s 30,000 ICU projections and/or for IHME’s projections to happen, the ICU count needed to explode from one

8/18 day to the next by times over of the daily rise until then. Statistically it made no sense especially with all the lockdown measures which lag behind a good two weeks. (Infection to hospital can take a good 2 weeks). Anyway, Cuomo said yesterday that NY reached its apex.

9/18 @NYGovCuomo said it Saturday regarding Friday mumbers which was 5,009 ICU in use for Coronavirus. Turns out that the apex was not going to be pushed back from April 6-13 to “end of April,” which is another 2.5 weeks, and turns out that the Apex is not 30K ICUs or even 12K.

10/18 Here is the issue: The lockdown policies and dates were based on the expected 30K ICUs by April 6-13 and/or on the face-saving “end of April” apex. But since the Apex is not end of April and not 30,000 ICUs, why did Cuomo announce last week (after acknowledging that the bed

11/18 bed need will be way lower than feared; hence the virus much less an issue than feared) that the lockdown will be extended by another two weeks? @NYGovCuomo says that ‘now is not the time to be lax.’ I agree. But now is not the time to dismiss the flaws in the math either.

12/18 The flaw being that NY was never going to reach those bleak numbers even when open (albeit with a focus on hygiene and draw down on latge gatherings). Consider, they say that ICU need runs a few weeks behind infection. This means that the ICU need at the end of March

13/18 was based on what happened in NY a good 2-3 week before that. Well, NY was mostly open! Cuomo announced a 500 person limit only on Thursday March 12th. Yet despite NY being so open, it generated a need of only* 300 ICU beds a day weeks later. I wrote only* because the

14/18 the projections that Cuomo worked off of were expecting a jump of up to 1,500 a day (and they expected that well into the shutdown too). Furthermore, in early March anyone who breathed the same air as an infected person was told to stay home for 14 days. This imagines that

15/18 Coronavirus is extremely contagious. Possible. But as of Fri April 10th, NY has 180,458 cases. This is 0.92% of the state’s population. Does it make sense that something so contagious has infected so few people over so many weeks? No. NY has now easily millions of cases.

16/18 At 8,627 deaths among 2 million cases, the death rate is 0.43% which is much lower than the “official” 4.80% (8,627 deaths among 180,458 known cases). You can’t say you have a 4.8% Case Fatality Rate by counting only 180K known cases after behaving for weeks that you

17/18 have millions of cases. This is how you got the clown 30,000 ICU projection in the first place! Ill explain: On the one hand they see Coronavirus’ CFR as 4.8% because they count deaths relative to known cases but then they assume that there are many more cases that are just

18/18 not counted and said “wo imagine if 4.8% of all those cases die.” Sorry no. If you have all those cases, then the CFR in NY is not 4.8%; it is 0.4 of a percent! Indeed elevated. Hence, some measures are needed for a while but not the ones that we have now.

19/18 (sorry, I need to add a few more tweets). The math that everyone easily has Coronavirus; easily infects everyone and that a huge percent dies, led to lockdown policies, but those assumptions were clearly going to be way off and were way off so why double down on lockdowns?

20/18 Go out and say “we did not know what we know now, but clearly even when NY was much more open than now, the ICU count did not rise anywhere close to the dark numbers that we expected which led to many of the lockdown policies. As such we will ease up some of those

21/18 travel/work/outings restrictions while we double our efforts on hygiene such as public/large places needing to disinfect surfaces; peoppe using gloves/masks; seniors should put an extra effort at staying home for a few more weeks.” The wild math also led to a mess at

22/18 hospitals/nursing homes and it likely led to deaths too. Please see this thread about hospitals to understand the issue and how to correct it.

https://twitter.com/yossigestetner/status/1247409589785632770