A new government report puts new grim numbers on how the next month of the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to go. According to modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the daily death toll from the virus is expected to rise steadily, rising to 3,000 a day or more by early June.
There are numerous reasons to treat this number with skepticism. There's also good reason to believe the actual death toll, as some states move to "reopen" even as their own death counts rise, may be even worse than the new numbers are letting on.
You can view the new report here. Of particular note are the new predictions for cases and deaths per day, displayed on a logarithmic scale.
The first clue something is not right is in the "deaths" graph. As can be seen by the blue dots, the CDC is continuing to model deaths using a model that has badly undercounted actual deaths by a full order of magnitude. (The model of projected cases, however, is more on track. One interpretation of those results might be that while the current model fits "reported" cases fairly cleanly, there’s a vast number of cases that aren't being "reported" but are still resulting in death.)
The CDC model suggests deaths are going to begin to surge in roughly two weeks, precisely the time it takes the virus to reestablish itself as stay-at-home orders are weakened in Republican-led states; by the end of the month, deaths will reach 3,000 per day—and will get still worse.
Again, though: The model being used has undercounted actual deaths over the last two months by an order of magnitude. That suggests that the true surge could be far greater than the flawed midrange scenario suggests. Far greater.
The second reason for skepticism is duller but more simple: The Trump administration has lied repeatedly and relentlessly about the scope of the virus' spread. We cannot take any information from the government as factual—either for better or for worse—in an environment of rampant administration propaganda.
Donald Trump has been yet again moving the "success" goalposts of late, belatedly abandoning the "60,000" deaths number (now that 60,000 deaths have been swiftly surpassed) to suggest that the new number will be perhaps 70,000, or 90,000, or more. This suggests that the man is not entirely devoid of his senses and can at least parse out that he can no longer claim "success" at a number now made obsolete.
There is at least some possibility that the administration will put forward a new prediction of catastrophic mass death intended precisely to make Trump's unforgivable botching of the pandemic seem like a victory in comparison. The new charts show that 50,000 deaths per day is not outside the realm of possibility; it is all but certain that the Trump team will soon proclaim 3,000 a day, or even 10,000 a day as a supposed Great Victory by the idiot manchild and his team of corrupt incompetents.
An initial New York Times writeup on the report notes that ex-Trump administration official Scott Gottlieb confessed that mitigation in the form of stay-at-home orders "didn’t work as well as we expected," in that "we expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths" that have not yet arrived. But this is unsurprising: Those measures were never put into place in numerous parts of the country, and never enforced with the vigor seen in other nations. They weren't going to stamp out the virus, only slow it.
The new charts do model the predictable effects of weakening those orders: A new, sharp surge in cases and in deaths. The only question is how high it will be.
The most baffling part of all of this is that Trump's team continues to both acknowledge that the death toll will continue to rise and continue to demand an immediate weakening of stay-at-home orders in an attempt to bolster the economy and pretend the effects of a worldwide disaster are simply not happening.
If fewer 2,000 deaths a day resulted in bodies stacked in spare rooms in American hospitals, the use of trucks as makeshift morgues, and emergency plans to bury dead Americans in city parks due to a lack of space anywhere else, how will Americans react to 3,000 deaths a day? 4,000? The "reopening" of willing states presumes that state residents will be indifferent to new surging death counts in their own towns and families, willingly returning to their usual economic patterns despite an imminent risk of death.
That is a bold—and psychopathic—assumption. It suggests that the Republican, conservative, and Trump’s own strategy for the pandemic will continue to be to pretend it does not exist or is not nearly as bad as all evidence suggests it is, upon which a miracle will happen and they will somehow be proven right. We saw it with Trump’s embrace of a supposed wonder drug; we saw it in every administration claim that “the media” was overplaying the worldwide pandemic for the purposes of making the White House look bad. At every stage the plan is to do nearly nothing, then claim victory if the more prudent actions of individual states and cities still result in a national outcome better than the worst possible one.
We were told 60,000 deaths would be a great victory. Where will the next victory be marked?