Thread by @ashishkjha

Through their votes, the American people have decided they want a new approach to the pandemic

But we have 73 days until new President takes office

73 hard days

Without action, additional 100,000 Americans will die by inauguration day. At least

So we can't wait to act

Thread

The key is that we are not likely to get much action from the Trump Administration

So we need to look for leadership elsewhere

But first, a little data on how we got here

Let’s talk about this moment.

All data from @covid19tracking using 7-d moving avgs

2/n

First, the current surge started soon after labor day.

We went into labor day with about 35K new cases/day

And now, we are at about 100,000 per day

And as you’d expect, increases in hospitalizations followed about 2 weeks later

We had about 28,000 people in the hospital in mid-September

Now we are at 50,000 people hospitalized

And sure enough, increases in deaths followed 2+ weeks after that

We started October with about 700 Americans dying daily

Today, we are at about 1000 Americans dying daily

So now, we are identifying 100K-120K cases / day

This is the acceleration phase. Infections are rising fast

But there is one more piece of bad news:

% of tests coming back positive has risen a lot

It was around 5% in early September, now it is closer to 9%

That means we are missing many more infections today than we were 2 months ago

Here's the kicker:

Suspect the true number of new infections in US now is somewhere between 300K and 400K. Per day

I know. Depressing. But bear with me

Will get to what we can do shortly

7/10

And 1,000 deaths a day today?

Represents infections from a month ago

Today's infections are 3X that

Would not be surprising to get to 2000+ deaths a day in December

So when public health experts say they're worried.

This is why

So can we avoid this?

Absolutely!

8/10

So what do we need to do?

5 things

1. We should not accept that Trump team will do nothing. We pay them. We need to find ways to get them to do more

2. Congress should get $ to states for testing, schools, etc

3. States need to ramp up testing

They can with more money

9/10

4 Everyone just needs to wear a mask

Come on people. To save tens of thousands of lives? No brainer

5 the biggest problem is indoor gatherings – formal (dining) and informal (house get-togethers)

To quote @GovRaimondo people need to knock it off

We all have to do more

10/11

We have hard couple of months ahead

In 73 days, we'll have a team in place that has promised to use science to drive policy

Good

But they won't be able to fix things on day 1

There is a lot we can do now

All of us: Congress, governors, mayors, us as individuals

11/12

If we do those 5 things: push for more federal action, get congress to provide $, governors to push testing, we wear masks and avoid indoor gatherings

We can keep schools open, save lives, prevent healthcare system from collapse

And that would make for a much better 2021

Fin