10ofRods
Verified Anthropologist
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2019
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The article is rather misleading. First of all, it quotes a surgeon and he says the pandemic has only killed about 60,000-65,000 Americans, which was true the day he spoke. However, it isn't over! We're only about halfway through this wave. We don't know how long the tails will take to flatten, but it is certainly not looking like the IMHE model of a nice, balanced bell curve is accurate.
In theory, if we have lost 60,000 citizens to CoVid at the midway point, if we now have better therapeutics, we can expect to lose another 30-40,000. So the initial estimates are wrong, but so is the doctor in the article. I think he's trying to talk about the "peak" state and hospital use, so I get his point. But we all know that New York wasn't affect equally, that certain areas of NYC saw massive overuse of resources, not under use. It was hard to know at the time just how bad it could get elsewhere, but the transit system in NYC bears great responsibility for how intense the pandemic was in NYC.
Personally, I think we'll get above 100,000 deaths for 2020, via CoVid, in the US - if all deaths are reported. Some states have not reported all their nursing home deaths, for example.
I say that because we've been at more than 2000 deaths per day in the US for about a week, with 3000 reported from yesterday. So hardly a stable, benign situation. That's 14,000 deaths per week if we can get down to 2000 (which remains to be seen). Or another 56,000 deaths in the next month. If we can bring our death rates down to an average of 1000 per day in the next month (which is possible, even with some states reopening, I guess), that's still another 30,000 deaths. For a total of 95,000. And it still won't be over.
By year end, we should definitely be above 100,000 and no one knows how close to 250,000 we'll be - but if I had to bet, I think we'll be closer to 200,000 than 60,000 deaths.
It just isn't over. It's not going to be over for a while.