IF the ship changed course.
GOOD
NEWS: US deaths
from the coronavirus could
be reduced to 1.1 million
by
July 4th via “social
distancing” measures, new
projection
shows
9 March, 2020
We finally have some good news to report. The number of Americans killed by the coronavirus by July4th can be reduced to only 1.1 million — or even just 1,300 with a far more aggressive approach — through the pursuit of “social distancing” measures, our new projection simulation shows (when using an R0 value of 2.4, which still may be far too low).
“Social
distancing” essentially means medical
martial law.
Our new pandemic projection model shows it absolutely
works to
halt the spread of the virus. That’s why Italy just declared
medical martial law across the entire country, essentially ordering
all citizens to self-quarantine and not leave their homes across the
entire country.
It’s
now crystal clear that medical
martial law can stop the spread of the coronavirus in the United
States.
To
understand why national quarantines work so well, you
can now download the “Pandemic Projection Model” spreadsheet
yourself at this link and
run various scenarios using your own numbers. Our new model (Revision
2) includes a variable called “Social distancing suppression”
that allows you to enter a value from 1% to 99%. This is then
calculated into a suppression factor of new, daily infections.
This
new model, which replaces Revision 1 released last week, shows that
if an R0 value of 2.4 is used together with a social suppression
value of 25%, the aggregate deaths in the USA is reduced to just 1.1
million people by July 4th.
If
you assume the R0 value is actually 4.5 — which may be more
accurate — then you have to achieve a social distancing suppression
factor of 60% to limit the number of dead to 1.1 million by July 4th.
This
is about half the projected number of deaths compared to the previous
model which used a different algorithm that did not compensate for
social distancing suppression of the spread of the virus.
And
yes, we understand that typically the R0 value would incorporate the
social distancing suppression factor, but we have intentionally
broken it out as a separate variable so that it can be manipulated on
its own.
You
can download the spreadsheet yourself and run your own scenarios to
see how many infections and deaths might occur using your own
numbers.
With a 50% suppression factor, the number of deaths is just 1,322 by early July
If
you assume a 50%
suppression factor for
the projection while using an R0 value of 2.4, that puts “today”
at day 53, with 22 deaths. If you then count forward from there to a
new day #170 (you will need to add more rows of calculations), which
represents the new July 4th under this model, the
number of deaths plunges to just 1,322.
In
other words, social
distancing is the answer (along
with anti-virals, of course, which is a form of suppressing
socially-induced infections).
But the
higher the R0 value, the stronger the medical martial law has to be
in order to overcome it.
(This makes intuitive sense.)
Trump must immediately place the entire United States of America into a quarantine lockdown, or the coronavirus will continue to spread
The
bottom line here is that if President Trump wants to stop this
pandemic from killing millions, he must order nationwide closings of
air traffic, roads, schools, churches, public transportation and
other forms of interaction that spread the virus. He must essentially
declare (and enforce) a nationwide quarantine, Italy-style.
If
we achieve just a 50% reduction in new infections with the virus R0
value at 2.4, the number of deaths drops
from 1.1 million to about 1,300.
To understand why the math works this way, download the spreadsheet
yourself and play with the scenarios.
So
far, however, Trump is claiming this virus is “no worse than the
flu,” which means the suppression factor at this moment is fairly
close to zero.
Download
the spreadsheet yourself, change the social distancing suppression
factor to 1% and see what happens (if you dare). You’ll quickly see
that if Trump continues to deny the seriousness of this pandemic, it
goes ballistic very, very quickly and ends up killing millions of
Americans. But if he gets serious and orders all domestic air traffic
halted and cities quarantined, the entire epidemic can be ended this
year, long before Election Day.
Which
future will Trump choose? Nobody knows. But if Trump doesn’t come
to grips with the reality of this pandemic instead of just stupidly
telling us it’s no worse than the flu, he
won’t be president much longer and
millions of Americans will be needlessly killed by an epidemic that
could have been stopped but wasn’t.
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