Thread by @cha_myoung

1/ The pandemic has felt endless, so the beginnings seem like a distant memory. Does anyone remember the worst-case model of 1.5-2.2m deaths that the White House used to “shock and awe” in March ’20?

To date, there have been 864k deaths in the US.

A look back below🧵

2/ Before this press conference, Trump compared COVID to the flu with only “22 deaths”, “life & the economy go on.”

Sound familiar?

If only the current death rate — with all of the advantage of our vaccines and therapeutics — were as low as the flu today.

3/ The current 7-day average of COVID deaths is 2k+/day with yesterday's number of 3,866 deaths being one of the worst days ever during the pandemic.

At this rate, this is a 20-50x difference from what the average flu season is like!

https://twitter.com/cha_myoung/status/1477422069251915777

4/ Going back to early 2020, there were strong reactions to this WH prediction of hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I’ll never forget @MikeFrancesa’s reaction at the time. Worth a listen if you didn’t hear it:

5/ There were of course naysayers who said that the projections were overblown, even inside the White House.

6/ While the Trump administration could have saved more lives, the same could be said for Biden’s first year where more people have now died (400k+) than during the Trump era.

IMO, there is plenty of blame to go around for preventable deaths.

news.yahoo.com/dr-deborah-bir…

7/ The lack of national unity in promoting vaccines in late 2020 after the election was a missed opportunity, which likely contributed to vaccine hesitancy throughout 2021.

politico.com/news/2020/12/1…

8/ Would it be shocking for deaths to reach the worst case scenario of 1.5m+ deaths?

Yes it would, but we could reach that shocking milestone by 2023 if the mortality rate doesn’t improve from the 1,500-2,000 daily deaths the US has averaged over the last several months.

9/ We all welcome the arrival of the oral therapies as the silver bullet, but we have had other "savior" therapies to reduce mortality that did not exist in March 2020 — remdesivir, dexamethasone, convalescent plasma, monoclonal antibodies.

And yet here we are.

10/ Unless something materially changes, we have considerably more disease burden ahead. There are >100 million under-vaccinated and immunocompromised people in the United States, which is a very large pool of susceptible people at risk of death.

11/ With the failure of the federal vaccine mandate and a pretty dug in group of people who will never get vaccinated, we may be stalemated as a society where we have to grow used to a “new normal” of excess death.

newsweek.com/poll-unvaccina…

12/ As we approach the two-year mark of this White House press conference, I wonder if there is a Deborah Birx in the current administration who has second thoughts about our current path forward.