We know that Trump and the White House have been trying for weeks to wish away reality. Today they had something of a change in stance.
Why?
Was it the dropping stock market, was it persistence of the experts finally getting through Trump’s thick skull? Or was it a British report, a horrific projection of what continued (incompetent) inaction leads to?
There is a very interesting article up at the NYT, describing what Dr. Birx says lead to the White House’s change of stance today.
In a word, fear. The fear that the death toll in the USA might reach as high as 2.2 million should the administration continue doing too little, too late and too incompetently. Fear instilled, we are told, a week ago by a 20-page estimate of the likely death tolls under different conditions of inaction, through to best case mitigation. The report comes from Imperial College London. It is stark in its assessment.
Sweeping new federal recommendations announced on Monday for Americans to sharply limit their activities appeared to draw on a dire scientific report warning that, without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die.
To curb the epidemic, there would need to be dramatic restrictions on work, school and social gatherings for periods of time until a vaccine was available, which could take 18 months, according to the report, compiled by British researchers. They cautioned that such steps carried enormous costs that could also affect people’s health, but concluded they were “the only viable strategy at the current time.”
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Dr. Birx’s description of the findings were consistent with those in the report, released on Monday by an epidemic modeling group at Imperial College London. The lead author of the study, Neil Ferguson, an epidemiology professor, said in an interview that his group had shared their projections with the White House task force about a week ago and that an early copy of the report was sent over the weekend.
So, it took a whole extra week to get Fat Nixon to grasp the import of the report?
In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months (Figure 1A). In such scenarios, given an estimated R0 of 2.4, we predict 81% of the GB and US populations would be infected over the course of the epidemic. Epidemic timings are approximate given the limitations of surveillance data in both countries: The epidemic is predicted to be broader in the US than in GB and to peak slightly later. This is due to the larger geographic scale of the US, resulting in more distinct localised epidemics across states (Figure 1B) than seen across GB. The higher peak in mortality in GB is due to the smaller size of the country and its older population compared with the US. In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality.
In other words, with dilatory incompetence, we might have seen at least 2.2 fatalities. According to the NYT piece, that is what finally got Fat Nixon’s attention.
Which in a cruel and ironic twist means the US administration is ahead of the government in the study author’s home country — where Boris Johnson’s cabinet are not fully applying the methods advocated by Ferguson et al.