“There is still no plan for the end of the coronavirus crisis. Aside from flattening the curve to ease the burden on the health-care system, the country has accomplished essentially none of the necessary preparatory work required to begin to reopen.” (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
“That is true by nearly every metric, but let’s begin with testing, the most fundamental. On March 30, 117,450 COVID-19 tests were conducted nationally. On April 30, it was 229,599. Testing had only doubled during a month designed to buy time to mount a sufficient response.”
“How many tests would we need to be able to safely open up, as we are already beginning to anyway? Estimates vary, but one low-end estimate puts the number at 500,000 to 700,000 tests every day — two to three times the capacity we have today. That’s the low end.”
“Another estimate comes from economist Paul Romer: 3 million every day. A third calls for 5 million tests daily by June and 20 million every day before proceeding to full reopening. Five million is about 25 times what we are doing now; 20 million is nearly a hundred times more.”
Then there are contact tracers. “How many of those would we need? Last week, a group of powerful former federal public-health officials called for around 180,000 of them; other proposals range from 100,000 to 300,000....”
“In response, NPR conducted a nationwide survey and found 7,602 currently working across 41 states. Surge plans would bring that total to 36,587 — barely a sixth of the estimated need.”
“When the White House first released its guidelines for ‘opening up America again,’ on April 15, it suggested that reopening would only be advisable following a ‘downward trajectory of documented cases within a 14-day period.’ That is not the case for the U.S. as a whole.”
“On May 6, there were 23,841 new cases reported; on April 23, there were 7,588 new cases reported; and on April 28, there were 22,541 new cases reported.”
“And while some of those new cases reflect the expansion of testing capacity, the death totals are far less ambiguous. On May 6, there were 2,144 deaths from COVID-19 nationally; on April 28, it was 1,369; on April 23, it was 1,721.”
“On May 4, a leaked report from the CDC suggested that, rather than moving in the right direction, the death totals were likely to get considerably worse very fast — with an average of about 3,000 deaths (and 200,000 new cases) a day as soon as June 1.”
“But the much-talked-about headline numbers did not communicate all that well just how dire the near future depicted by the model really was.”
“For the lifetime of the model’s projections, no day of data came close to the median prediction. For the last two weeks, the results have fallen at or above the model’s 75th-percentile projection. That percentile, on June 1, projects more than 7,500 deaths every day.”
“For most of the lifetime of the model, daily deaths fell at or above the 97th-percentile projection. For June 1, that projection is for 15,000 deaths every day.”
The conditions that produced that data — less social distancing, fewer lockdowns — are more like what we will see going forward than what we’ve seen the last two weeks.
“If that rate held for a month, it would produce 750,000 deaths just in June. And though the leaked projections end June 1, the model shows so sign of flattening then, which means, as far as the CDC is concerned, the daily totals could grow as the summer goes on.”
By every metric, we have utterly failed to prepare ourselves for the reopening we are now beginning.
We have perhaps 1/25th of the testing we need, 1/25th of the contact tracers we need, and no sign of the sustained decline in infections or deaths we were told was a necessary precondition for reopening anywhere. We are beginning to reopen nearly everywhere. (X/x)
