Opening Up Early Could Cause The U.S. Caseload To Spike-- Gigantically In Just One Month

Yesterday, one of the floating death trap companies, Carnival, announced it is planning to start up it's watery killing machines again on August 1. There will be 8 ships sailing out of Florida and Texas. They hope the experiment goes well enough-- I wonder hat the metrics are-- so that they can get the whole fleet sailing by the end of August. Anyone want to take bets on that? I say it won't happen.

Josh Dawsey and a team of 3 other Washington Post reporters wrote about the now infamous draft government report projecting that COVID-19 cases "will surge to about 200,000 per day by June 1, a staggering jump that would be accompanied by more than 3,000 deaths each day." That also amounts to about 3,000 daily deaths (up from 1,324 one day deaths on Monday). If you've been watching Chris Martenson's daily podcasts or even just watching the numbers come in, this shouldn't be a big surprise to anyone except people addicted to Fox News.

The documents is predicting sharp increases cases and deaths beginning in about two weeks-- which sounds like they're taking into account the premature opening up of businesses in Georgia, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Ohio.

A friend of mine calls nearly every day-- less so than he used to-- and babbles some claptrap about the University of Washington model. I keep telling him that what comes out of a model is only as good as what goes in and that everything about the University of Washington model in wrong and that whatever they say isn't somewhat worthless, it's 100% worthless and that he should stop bothering me with their pointless, absurd conclusions and predictions.

The actual numbers of new cases in the U.S. were 27,348 from Saturday to Sunday. From Sunday to Monday it looks like around the same, maybe a little less. Monday the U.S. crossed the 1.2 million cases line.

If it goes from around 20,000 a day to 200,000 a day-- 10 times as many-- in about a month... well, perhaps some of the insane governors like Bill Lee (R-TN), Greg Abbott (R-TX), Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Kristi Noem (R-SD), Pete Ricketts (R-NE), Eric Holcomb (R-IN), Kim Reynolds (R-IA) and Tate Reeves (R-MS) will think twice about rushing to infect their populations. And maybe some of the spineless wonders like Gavin Newsom will tell his business donors and the vigilantes to go screw themselves.

The documents-- which come from the CDC-- seem to indicate that the trajectory after June 1 will continue to steepen, but those numbers weren't released.

The work contained a wide range of possibilities and modeling was not complete, according to Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who created the model.

...“I had no role in the process by which that was presented and shown. This data was presented as an FYI to CDC... it was not in any way intended to be a forecast,” Lessler said.

Lessler said that while the exact numbers and charts in the CDC document may differ from the final results, they do show accurately how covid-19 cases could spiral out of control. He said 100,000 cases per day by the end of the month is within the realm of possibility. Much depends on political decisions being made today.

“There are reopening scenarios where it could get out of control very quickly,” Lessler said.

One federal official said the data was presented at a recent briefing for the National Response Coordination Center, a part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that coordinates federal support during major incidents and emergencies. The official, who was not authorized to discuss internal government briefings, spoke on condition of anonymity.

It was not immediately clear whether the projections, which also carry logos of the Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, are based on ramped up testing, the attempt to reopen some states, the time lag between a rise in cases and deaths or some combination of those factors.

The White House issued a statement Monday that “this is not a White House document, nor has it been presented to the Coronavirus Task Force or gone through interagency vetting. This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force, or data that the task force has analyzed.

...The forecast is at odds with remarks made Sunday evening by President Trump, who said the United States could eventually suffer as many as 100,000 deaths. At 3,000 deaths per day and rising, the national total would quickly outstrip that number if the new report is correct.

A senior White House official said the document would not change the White House planning on reopening.

White House officials have been relying on other models to make decisions on reopening, including the IHME model and a “cubic model” prepared by Trump adviser and economist Kevin Hassett and the Council of Economic Advisers.

People with knowledge of the “cubic model” say it currently shows deaths dropping precipitously in May-- and essentially going to zero by May 15.

In recent days, experts following the course of the pandemic in the United States have begun to predict that the country would be living with a sizable covid-19 case load for some time.

Researchers at the Center for Infectious Disesease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota issued a report Thursday that suggested the pandemic would last 18 to 24 months, reappearing in waves of varying intensity.

On Sunday, Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said efforts to mitigate spread of the virus had helped but not succeeded in quelling its spread. He said on CBS’s Face the Nation that the United States faces the possibility of “persistent spread” of the virus that could spark a significant outbreak at any time if schools and workplaces “let down their guard.”

“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected. We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point, and we’re just not seeing that,” Gottlieb said.

The largest number of deaths in the United States in a single day since the pandemic began occurred on April 21, when 2,874 people died. (A total of 6,147 deaths were reported on April 14, but they included New York City adding more than 3,000 probable deaths to the daily total.)

To date, 1.16 million people have been infected by the coronavirus and more than 67,000 have died. Both figures are widely believed to undercount the actual totals.