Lessons That Could Be Learned

What are the lessons to be learned? The easy ones are:

1) Keep the pandemic experts employed.
2) Listen to the experts' advice.
3) Cooperate with international agencies and foreign governments.
4) Be prepared to implement screening at ports of entry.
5) Onshore critical PPE manufacturing or require a sufficiently large rotating stock at distributors that a surge in demand can be handled.
6) Ditto for testing supplies.
7) Make sure states coordinate as necessary.

The hard one is:

8) Don't elect people who don't believe in expertise.

The last lesson will be extremely hard for America to learn because 40-45% of the electorate has complete disdain for expertise, and about 5-10% has no idea what expertise looks like beyond Judge Judy.

Let's Crunch the Dead

330 million x 40% infection rate x 1% death rate = 1,320,000 dead.

330 million x 30% infection rate x 0.5% death rate = 495,000 dead.

One is more optimistic than the other, but is either realistic?

We just don't have enough data to know. Testing is ramping up, but so are deaths, and we don't know how far behind testing is to the spread of the virus among the population of the US. We know that "social isolation" has worked to-date in other countries, but we don't know how effective social isolation is in the US. And there's no hard cutoff date for the beginning of social isolation because different states have done different things, and the states that have acted the most still acted in stages over a couple of weeks.

My guess (on 2020-03-25) is the total directly attributable deaths in the US will be in the range of 20,000-30,000 - if the social isolation holds instead of being short-circuited by the stock-pumper-in-chief. But that is completely a guess.

For now, we should treat all estimates - high or low - with skepticism.

The craziest timeline, or the stupidest timeline?

I woke up yesterday afternoon from a nap and had to check the news before I believed my memories.