In this deeply charged climate, plagued by injustice and marches, we search for some common catharsis. But here we must acknowledge that someone is building a business and someone is endorsing a viewpoint. While we appreciate the achievements, there is extraordinary sorrow in our inability not to politicize.
Regarding the weekly stats for the COVID-19 pandemic, things continue essentially unchanged. Georgia is maybe headed down just slightly (after going up then down); Portugal is maybe headed up just slightly (on a flat line). For the past week, Georgia has averaged 584 cases and 26 deaths per day. Portugal has averaged 247 cases and 13 deaths per day. So, Georgia is maintaining a rate that more than doubles Portugal, but at least things are steady.
Tomorrow, Portugal will move to Phase 3 of it's pandemic plan, with cinemas and child care centers open, and further restrictions lifted on dine-in restaurants – the Health Minister calls it Portugal's 'day of great deconfinement'. Lisbon's R0 value has risen just above one, so shopping malls in the area will remain 'curbside', at least til Thursday.
cases: 6,200,772 global • 1,819,797 USA • 32,500 Portugal
deaths: 371,763 global • 105,634 USA • 1,410 Portugal
With the stay-home orders being phased out, Lisbon is coming back to life. This is the second week of 'Phase 2' – outdoor cafes, dine-in restaurants, and museums are open with restrictions. It's the patrons at the outdoor cafe tables that really seem to signal a return to normality. We have scheduled a picnic with a few other ex-pat friends in Parque da Bela Vista.
On Google and Apple Maps satellite views, Bela Vista looks like a vast, dusty void to the west of our neighborhood of Alvalade. From the streets near our local church (São João de Brito), the Bela Vista looks like a distant, grassy bank. It does not appear to be a great place for a get together on a windy summer day.
We collect friends as we go, through the bairro of Areeiro, exploring new streets. There is a handsome church at the Praça de Londres, the Igreja de São João de Deus – two thickset campanários, exaggerated vertical windows, and a wide, gated portal. It's in a beautiful garden-like setting and we'll have to come back, soon. Walking the broad, pastel streets lined with trees and tiles, I remember why we fell in love with Lisbon.
We meet another group of friends at the Praça Francisco Sá Carneiro (top image), near the entrance to the Areeiro metro stop. This is a five-spoke round-about, with a striking steel and stone monument in the center, and tile-roofed towers all around.
We head north to the park, to the eastern end of the Roma-Areeiro train station, and on the other side of the apartment buildings, the city vanishes. The track beds open up and looking down, it seems as if the country-side is at the threshold. An unpaved path takes us uphill and into wildflowers and mounds dotted with young olive trees. Panoramas of Lisbon and the Rio Tejo appear as the path ambles. We enjoy lunch at convenient picnic tables, in the shade of a copse of pine trees.
Coming out of Bela Vista, we cross a long pedestrian bridge over the tracks further east, and arrive above an area gridded with communal vegetable gardens, and below another group of multistory blocks. The verdant contrast is unexpected, but dissolves as we pass the first layer of structures and return, suddenly, to Lisbon.
The group's journey ends at the eastern end of the Parque da Fonte Luminosa – at the far end is the Instituto Superior Técnico (the MIT of Portugal). The fountain is turned off, and the statues of the stout bathers are now easily viewed, bronzed by the rusty water, and set-off by the flowering shrubs.
Before we reach home, we happen upon a small parade of classic British cars: a Daimler V8 sedan and two Jaguar E-types, a silver coupe and a red V-12 roadster, immaculate as the day they were bought. They are loaded onto the sidewalk where we claim them as ours, but only for a second or two.
Donna's cousin, José Miguel, visits us on Friday and we plan to run a few errands together. It's another warm and breezy day. José Miguel's friend lives in Goa but owns an apartment in Arroios, recently named by TimeOut magazine as the 'coolest neighborhood in the world'. He needs to check the apartment and gather the mail.
We stroll south along the Avenida de Roma, doing some shopping, and at the crossing of the Avenida dos Estados Unidos da America, we are surprised by a memorial to the 9/11 tragedy (image above).
The Avenida de Roma is a broad, speedy boulevard, though still not as busy as before the pandemic. From Alvalade, as we approach Arroios, the scale of the architecture comes down, while the age goes up. Arroios is colorful and active, but also a bit gritty.
The way home is by the Mercado de Arroios, a low-slung, dodecagonal (twelve-sided) rotary of stalls, stores, and restaurants. Then we finish our walk through the Praça Francisco Sá Carneiro to the Praça de Alvalade. Feels great to get out and enjoy the city.
Pandemic Update
Georgia is still up around seven hundred cases per day; Portugal is still around two hundred. It's been a month since Georgia started the re-opening process, and at least there has not been a spike. For the past week, Georgia has averaged 719 cases and 32 deaths per day; Portugal has averaged 237 cases and 14 deaths. The US will count over one hundred thousand deaths in the next day or two. It's a new kind of Memorial Day.
cases: 5,436,911 global • 1,669,311 USA • 30,623 Portugal
deaths: 344,548 global • 98,740 USA • 1,316 Portugal
UPDATE: Microsoft introduces new Excel: Coronavirus Edition.
My first blog post of this pandemic is dated March 18th, so we are starting our third month in this strange, stay-at-home, COVID-19 dream-state. Of course, this is the first day in Portugal with 'Phase 2' rules. For example, dine-in restaurants and museums and monuments are open, though with restrictions. The weather is really warming up here, and the crowds and the traffic are increasing daily. But there is no place that feels too crowded; people are still cautiously distancing and wearing masks.
Trump proclaimed that America was leading the world. South Korea had its first infection on January 20, the same day as America’s first case, and was, he said, calling America for help. “They have a lot of people that are infected; we don’t.” “All I say is, ‘Be calm,’” said the president. “Everyone is relying on us. The world is relying on us.”
He could just as well have said baseball is popular or foreigners love New York. American leadership in any disaster, whether a tsunami or an Ebola outbreak, has been a truism for decades. The US is renowned for helping others in an emergency.
In hindsight, Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself.
Yet another article in The Atlantic describes some discrepancies with the recently published data on the CDC web site regarding testing. Without a national testing strategy, the US approach to the testing data is similarly decentralized. Without a central authority or reference, it is too easy to introduce doubt about any one source. Unsatisfied with accusing the media of creating 'fake news', the US has perfected a framework in which there is no real news.
A quick look at our two test subjects, Georgia and Portugal: both have a population of just over ten million, both reported their first cases on March 2nd, and both were about the same place on April 24th, when Georgia began to re-open – 22,491 cases and 899 deaths in Georgia, against 22,797 cases and 854 deaths in Portugal. Portugal began to re-open on May 3rd. The graphs show that Georgia has held steady since mid-April averaging around seven hundred new cases per day, while Portugal has dropped to around two hundred. The totals are beginning to tell a similar story – 37,552 cases and 1,609 deaths in Georgia, versus 29,036 cases and 1,218 deaths in Portugal.
Compared to Portugal, Georgia has added over eighty-eight hundred more cases (8,822), and well over three hundred (346) more deaths in three weeks.
Writing in the Washington Post, Stephanie McCrummen describes the scene at a mall in suburban Atlanta. Without national or state leadership issuing clear guidelines based on definitive data, the public is delightedly and dismissively dining, drinking, shopping, and getting manicures and haircuts.
[M]illions of Americans now find themselves free to make millions of individual decisions about how to calibrate their sense of civic duty with their pent-up desires for the old routines and indulgences of life.
In this grand gamble, Georgia has gone first, with Gov. Brian Kemp (R) dismissing public health experts who’ve warned that opening too soon could cause a catastrophic surge of deaths, placing his faith instead in the citizens of Georgia to make up their own minds about what risks and sacrifices they were willing to accept.
Portugal drops out of the top twenty-five countries for number of COVD-19 cases, having recently been passed by a rushing Belarus and oddballSweden. Coming up quickly: Bangladesh, the UAE, and even Singapore may re-pass Portugal in the next week.
The US is easily leading the world in both cases and deaths from COVID-19, with over one and half million cases and over ninety thousand deaths. The US has just over four percent of the world's population, but nearly thirty percent of all the deaths during this pandemic.
cases: 4,833,333 global • 1,529,144 USA • 29,209 Portugal • 440 Taiwan
deaths: 317,223 global • 90,996 USA • 1,231 Portugal • 7 Taiwan
Rearrange numbers, make optimistic graphs, confuse the public, re-open. Keep in mind the US CDC is located in Atlanta, Georgia.
The general situation is properly summarized by Prof. Tom Nichols in this Amanpour & Company interview; there is no adult supervision:
I think the [re-open] protesters are confusing freedom with nihilism.
This is not freedom in the way adults understand freedom, this is freedom in the way children understand freedom. 'I'm going to do things even if they're bad for me, merely because I can.'
This is not how mature citizens in a democracy help to make a democracy function.
I'll start this blog post by, again, rewinding to my childhood in West Virginia and playing back a conversation. People, strangers, clerks in stores for example, would often asked me, "Where are you from?" I'd say, "We live in Suncrest", and they'd insist, "No, where are you from, like where were you born?" I'd say, "I was born in Wisconsin. I'm an American," and they'd press some more, "No, where is your family from?" I'd say "My parents are from Taiwan," and they'd say something like, "Well, you speak English real good."
You want to get through your day, so you let those moments roll away. There were times I'd ask why, but the result was almost always defensiveness and anger, discomfort, and nothing gained.
I have watched so much of the coverage of President Trump's performances during the pandemic, but I am personally appalled by his use of racial micro-aggressions during the press conferences (and his sexist micro-aggressions and his not-so-micro-aggressions). It's difficult for anyone to watch this exchange with Weijia Jiang, and not cringe. For me it feels very familiar, as well as super cringey.
But unlike some slack-jawed local yokel, Trump is surrounded by assistants, press people, various 'secretaries', etc. Isn't someone telling him his words are inappropriate? But he does not hire advisors; he hires enablers. Trump is a bully who enjoys being a bully: name-calling, exaggerating, lying, belittling. It seems his behavior cannot be amended – can it? If someone tried to change his behavior, what would that look like?
Weijia Jiang is the White House Correspondent for CBS News. She grew up in West Virginia, too. She has been the White House Correspondent for nearly two years, though half that time was spent with Stephanie Grisham as Press Secretary, so there were no press briefings for quite a lot of Jiang's tenure. So it might be possible to excuse the President for not knowing the White House Correspondent from CBS News back when the pandemic and the briefings started. But now? Does anyone prep him? Let's look back at some of the public interactions between Jiang and Trump.
Kung-Flu
Back on March 17th, in the days when Trump was calling SARS-CoV-2 a 'Chinese virus', Jiang tweeted that WH officials had used the term 'Kung-Flu' to describe COVID-19. Again, I rewind to all the moments people have made Chinese food jokes, Chinese accountant jokes, or pulled at the corner of their eyes, and I've had to remind those people, 'Hey, I'm standing right here'.
After the tweet, Jiang, PBS Newshour's Yamiche Alcindor, and other reporters got into a drawn-out back and forth with Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway. Conway pushed back by asking the name of the source, and clarifying that she was married to an Asian American (George Conway's mother is Filipino). However for his part, Mr. Conway has written and commented, frequently and vigorously, that Trump is a racist.
You Ought to Be Ashamed
On April 3rd, during the Task Force Briefing, Jiang asked Trump about son-in-law and WH Senior Advisor Jared Kushner's use of the term 'our stockpile', when Kushner stated:
The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states' stockpiles that they then use.
Trump responded by asking, "What’s that? A gotcha? I gotcha? When you use the word 'our.'?" He then explained that Kushner was referring to the federal government, which would send resources to the states. When Jiang pointed out that Kushner had specifically said the stockpile was not for the states, Trump said, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You know what? You ought to be ashamed." Before cutting Jiang off and moving on to the next reporter, the President added, "You just asked your question in a very nasty tone."
Just Relax
At the briefing on April 19th, Trump responded to Jiang's questions about delays in warning the country by asking her, "Who are you with?" How does he still not know the WH Correspondent from CBS? Does he think she's from some Chinese press group? And his answer was, paraphrasing, "Look at what I did by banning China." As she clarified that the travel restrictions were not a ban, and tried to get a proper answer about the delays, he told her, "Nice and easy, nice and easy. Just relax."
When she explained that when the 'ban' was issued, the virus was already in the US, he replied by questioning her, "How many cases were there? Do you know the number?" She again tried to to refocus on her question about the delays, and he asked her to, "Keep your voice down. Please, keep your voice down." And he went on lying about how he 'closed up the entire country'.
You Should Ask China
Which brings us to yesterday's press conference in the Rose Garden, with banners on either side of the podium that read, 'America Leads the World in Testing', in all-caps. Trump literally proclaimed victory as the death toll sped past eighty thousand:
In every generation, through every challenge, and hardship, and danger, America has risen to the task, we have met the moment—and we have prevailed. Americans do whatever it takes to find solutions, pioneer breakthroughs, and harness the energies we need to achieve a total victory.
Jiang asked Trump about his statements that the US is doing 'far better' with testing than other countries, and why it matters if people were still losing their lives in the US. The President countered by suggesting to Jiang:
And maybe that's a question you should ask China. Don't ask me, ask China that question, okay?
As Trump punched that first Chi-na, Jiang sat confused for several seconds. The microphone cut in and out, as some staffer prevented rebuttal. The cameras caught her giving Trump a look that said, 'that sounded really racist.' As CNN's Kaitlan Collins approached the mic, it came live again, and she allowed Jiang to follow-up, "Why are you saying that to me, specifically, that I should ask China?" Trump said, "I'm saying that to anybody that would ask a nasty question like that." He then refused to let Collins ask a question, motioned to another reporter, Yamiche Alcindor, who motioned back toward Collins. Trump then thanked the group, and walked away from the podium.
However, if we rank the countries by population, per capita, the US is thirty-eighth at about thirty thousand per million (29,761/million). Granted, there are quite a few small countries at the top of the table, but the US is ahead of the UK (in 39th place with 29,566/m) but behind the following: Canada (in 36th with 30,099/m), Germany (in 32nd with 32,891/m), Portugal (in 14th with 54,277/m), Denmark (12th with 57,709/m), the UAE (2nd with 121,330/m), and Iceland (1st with 160,563/m). The President has been saying that the US testing leads by far, but that is simply not the case.
cases: 4,324,327 global • 1,402,275 USA • 27,913 Portugal
deaths: 291,693 global • 83,121 USA • 1,163 Portugal
UPDATE: Amazingly, Georgia's Department of Health has changed their graphs! The data in the fourteen-day window no longer shows the connecting lines between the data-points. I'd argue that keeping the data-points in a scatter-graph for the rolling average is still odd, but it is at least visually differentiated.
Along with other small shops (two hundred square meters or less), SEF is processing visas again. They called us and rescheduled my residency interview, which was on Wednesday. So I got my temporary residency approval, but I was only given a letter from the SEF office. The shop that prints cards and passports is still closed (except for emergencies), so I can only leave Portugal to return to the US; I cannot travel in the Shengen without the card. Even if I could, I don't think I'd want to go anywhere right now.
In fact, instead of suspending immigration and causing a big kerfuffle, as in the US, the government in Portugal is safeguarding all foreigners awaiting residency – as my interview on March 26th was cancelled, that included me. This is not amnesty. Portugal is simply providing legal standing for housing and employment, and access to the national health care system. Thus, no one feels the need to call lawyers or fly somewhere while courts and airlines are shut; everyone can stay safe, stay put, and stay sane.
On the big COVID-19 tables, Portugal drops out of the top twenty countries for confirmed cases, having been passed this week by Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, and most recently, Mexico – Pakistan and Chile are also gaining fast, with oddball Sweden catching Portugal a little more slowly (though Sweden has nearly tripled Portugal in deaths). The UK is moving up the charts, as is Russia – the UK passed Italy for second place in terms of deaths and Russia is now up to fifth place in terms of cases. The US, Russia, and Brazil are the only countries to add more than ten thousand new cases in a single day, in the past three days (think Trump, Putin, and Bolsonaro).
It's also been two weeks since Georgia began it's re-opening process, and the numbers are diverging as might be expected. As a reminder, Georgia and Portugal have the same population size, reported their first confirmed cases on the same day, and tracked to nearly identical stats by early and mid-April. But during the first week of May, Georgia has averaged about seven hundred sixty (759) new daily confirmed cases while Portugal has averaged just under three hundred (292). Since April 24th, Georgia's count has increased by over nine thousand (9,084), while Portugal's has increased by less than four thousand (3,918). Full graphs from March 2nd, with seven-day rolling averages below:
There are four criteria that states should meet in order to safely re-open ...
The first is to see the number of new cases decline for at least two weeks, and some states have met that criteria. But there are three other criteria and we suggest they should all be met ...
To my knowledge, there are no states that meet all four of those criteria.
She is also the co-author of a Road-map to Re-opening process, as well as the more comprehensive Guidance for Governors (being used by the National Governors Association). For example to reign-in the fragmentation, she proposes a national forecasting capacity like the the National Weather Service. So while there is no national plan, there are plans; it's simply up to the governors to follow them. Here is a kind of compendium of national summaries – states that are re-opening and whether or not they should, generally based on the un-issuedWhite House-CDC guidelines:
Hard to erase the image of Trump, when asked what metrics he's using to re-open the country, reply by pointing to his brain. That was just before Easter, almost sixty thousand in the US have died since. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that we have to think about the data and the models in the right way. Governments fight fear and fallacy with calm and clarity.
cases: 3,950,454 global • 1,295,058 USA • 27,268 Portugal
deaths: 271,799 global • 77,058 USA • 1,114 Portugal
This MSNBC video piece examines how guidelines are being applied, loopholed, or ignored. It also spotlights the White House's hypocrisy, when officials there say that a national testing program is unnecessary, while staffers are tested daily (but even then, are not required to wear face masks).
But hours later on April 30, CDC’s Chief of Staff McGowan told CDC staff that neither the guidance documents nor the decision trees “would ever see the light of day,” according to three officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
The next day, May 1, the emails showed, a staffer at CDC was told “we would not even be allowed to post the decision trees. We had the team (exhausted as they are) stand down.”
Laurie Garrett cheering essential workers, New York, New York Times
In an earlier blog post I mention the effects of Bill Gates' prescient TED Talk (conspiracy theories); in another post I mention the Cassandra Complex (impotent foreknowledge). So I am very happy to be introduced to Laurie Garrett in a profile by Frank Bruni. Garrett is a Pulitzer winning journalist, from her work tracking the Ebola outbreak in the 1995, and is also mentioned along side Gates and several others in a Vanity Fair article by David Ewing Duncan as a 'Cassandra'. Because she foresaw both HIV and COVID-19, she proclaims herself a 'Double Cassandra'. In her book, The Coming Plague, she also foresaw that there would be Cassandra's – so she's also a 'Meta-Cassandra'.
So being a Cassandra is a thing. She tells us what life might be like as we re-open from the 'lockdown':
This is history right in front of us. Did we go ‘back to normal’ after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an anti-terror state. And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this.
The statement in the article that really takes my breath is her comment about the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia:
I’ve heard from every CDC in the world — the European CDC, the African CDC, China CDC — and they say, ‘Normally, our first call is to Atlanta, but we ain’t hearing back.’ There’s nothing going on down there. They’ve gutted that place. They’ve gagged that place. I can’t get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like it’s safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the CDC?
If you want to know her better, and have some time, there is a fascinating and very personal talk with Garrett at the Columbia’s Earth Institute. Watch and be convinced as I am that she has some serious journalistic guts, and a ground-up understanding of the value in building, as well as the challenges facing, a strong public health infrastructure.
Speaking of Georgia, I have a reply here from the Department of Public Health from my last post (how about that?) – they explain:
This graph was added last week. If you read the data explanation at the top of the page, as well as the footnote directly under the graph you sent, you will understand. We are tracking cases based on date of onset of symptoms (if possible) or date test was sought. The date the test was confirmed is not a good indicator of when someone was a case in the state, as LabCorp and Quest saw significant delays in reporting results at one point. The average case rate accounts for things like delays in testing or batching that labs do when reporting results.
So let me just say, that, of course, I read the explanations and the footnotes, but the methodology is still unclear and the graphs still require a lot of clarification. There is no way to know, for example, if the records for May 1st (23 Confirmed Cases) and May 2nd (4 Confirmed Cases) are awaiting ten, or a hundred, or a thousand test results. Nor is there any way to account for future tests that would increase their numbers as onset dates. Basically, they are graphing the trend line of an incomplete dataset, and that is worse than meaningless.
The chart (above) presents the number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases over time. This chart is meant to aid understanding whether the outbreak is growing, leveling off, or declining and can help to guide the COVID-19 response.
This "chart is meant to aid understanding"? It does not. What's the opposite of aid?
So according to the DPH and if I understand this correctly, once they get a test back as 'confirmed', they determine an onset date for that result, and then increment the record for that onset date. For example, they announced their first confirmed case on March 2nd, but recorded that as occurring on February 2nd, so now the dataset is stretched over an extra month. One can only assume that, as they have caught up with testing, all the days before the fourteen-day window are complete (as opposed to a one month window).
That fourteen-day window line is like a Wonkawash, everything squishes into it and comes out the other side unrealistically clean.
Their reasoning is that "(t)he date the test was confirmed is not a good indicator of when someone was a case in the state". Well, what is a good indicator of the number of cases? In order for these graphs to be meaningful in that way, Georgia needs a much more robust dataset, and needs to do much more extensive testing. To date, Georgia has tested at a rate of 17,772 per million; Portugal, by contrast, has tested at 44,132 per million (and has completed a testing sweep through the nation's nursing homes).
By extension, in order for Georgia to justify it's re-opening on April 24th and manage the outbreak going forward, it must do much more than massage a few graphs. As public health officials have warned, even ones working in the Trump Administration, there must be much more testing and tracing. Remember, Georgia and Portugal have almost the exact same population sizes (just over ten million), and both reported their first confirmed cases on the same day (March 2nd).
Since I am not a statistician, I cannot call this 'statistically dishonest' (I think it is), but I can certainly call it 'graphically dishonest', as the complete and incomplete records are represented in the exact same way. Here are some changes the DPH could use to make things more 'honest':
discontinue the rolling average inside the fourteen-day window – displaying a trend line for an incomplete dataset is totally misleading;
similarly, discontinue the connected blue-line for data points inside the 14 day window;
perhaps, display the data points inside the fourteen day window as a series of vertical bar graphs, with confirmed cases for that onset date in blue, and pending tests for that onset date in yellow, thus providing a graphic range or area (in yellow) where the final results would fall;
to make it very clear on other graphed results in all the 14-day windows are incomplete, display that data in a manner that is graphically dissimilar to the confirmed data – where appropriate, state and/or illustrate if values are likely to rise.
It does seem like the only statistic that has any tangible value is the number of confirmed cases – apply them 'from testing date' if you are concerned about the processing time, but the public has already heard about the delays in testing. The onset date is an approximate value, adjustable from a day to a month, and cannot provide any precision for the graph. It is, therefore, easily manipulated to shape the graph as desired. Otherwise, they should change this graph's title to: 'COVID-19 Confirmed Cases from Estimated Disease Onset Date, Most Recent Fourteen Days Shown Incomplete'.
Meanwhile the world has reached three and a half million cases and a quarter of a million deaths. The US has reached one million two hundred thousand cases and is nearing seventy thousand deaths. President Trump has revised his 'expected death total' upward again to one hundred thousand; the IHME is still showing a total of 72,433 by August 4th on their projections web page.
Portugal is beginning to re-open today. As we walk down our street, art suppliers, hair dressers, copy shops, and the stationers are all open. There are a lot more people moving by. In the park, folks are playing paddle-ball again, and the courts are being cleaned for more matches. It feels like the epidemic here is really slowing down, with just over twenty-five thousand cases and one thousand deaths – averaging about two hundred new cases per day over the three-day weekend (Georgia averaged about eight hundred per day). As we walk I think: if I could have predicted a pandemic early last year, I would have proposed retiring and moving to Portugal.
cases: 3,619,504 global • 1,200,794 USA • 25,524 Portugal
deaths: 250,478 global • 69,116 USA • 1,063 Portugal
Cassandra this: MSNBC is reporting on a story from the New York Times regarding leaked CDC projections that the US death rate will double to three thousand per day by the end of May, with an infection rate of two hundred thousand new cases per day. This completely negates Trump's claim today that total US deaths from COVID-19 will be held to one hundred thousand. So, something important and vital from the CDC.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths over the next several weeks. The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double the current number of about 1,750.
The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.
UPDATE [May 5, 9AM DST]: IHME is now showing a total of 134,475 by August 4th on their projections web page.
