Covid-19 Update | April 6 at 7:34 PM

Evening update. The IHME model relied on by the White House Task Force for the second day in a row has severely overestimated CoVID deaths. They actually changed the model on April 5th and cut hospital resource use by nearly 50% and deaths by 15%. Despite the revisions down we sit 36 hours later and the total deaths in the US sit at 10,789. IHME projected 12539 today with the range from 11256-14281. They didn’t even hit within the range after recalibrating yesterday. And for Florida we have the same finding. IHME estimated 313 deaths by end of day and we sit at 254, at least that is in their range of 252-415. This is the model that was used to get many governors and the President to go along with Stay-At-Home orders. I’m not saying this isn’t a problem in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Louisiana, Massachusetts, DC, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Michigan, but the change from a local-regional approach to an all hands on deck national approach was predicated on this model, which isn’t turning out to be even close to the reality. We need to respect our local, state, and national officials; but we need more people asking how long we are willing to sacrifice productivity when the virus is receding before most of these recent stay at home orders would have even had an effect. Additional food for thought: Even the flawed IHME model shows the lower range of deaths is 49,000; of these 50% of the deaths are in patients in such poor health they were going to die of another cause by year end. At what point do we just accept 25,000 people will have the bad luck to succumb to CoVID-19 earlier than their time, which is 7 out of 100,000 Americans. Is it worth 2 weeks of economic pain, 4 weeks? 12 weeks? Do we do this again in the fall when upper respiratory viral illnesses re-emerge and there still isn’t a vaccine? Cancel school for next year?