Other countries use such varying criteria for cause of death it really is a guess. Then you have China, Iran, Russia I guess.

We may never really know the real numbers.

Looking at the US stats on this chart of countries, I get 10% new deaths yesterday. I’m not sure why you get 23%.

By the way, using the stats at this site, I calculate that about 40% of US deaths are in NY (and most of them in NYC). If you add to those NY deaths the states of Washington (the first “epicenter”) and NJ (most of the deaths there are in the part of NJ that’s in the greater NYC area), you get 54% of US deaths.

It’s quite astounding.

California may be way behind in testing, but I am pretty sure they are testing those who die of COVID-like symptoms or those who are seriously ill with them. Their case number is probably artificially low, but it’s the death number you were counting.

Nineteen days ago it was 27 and it went up 23% today. That is with all the measures currently in place. Note that California is still way behind in testing so that is a potentially large unknown.

That’s one of the thoughts I’ve been having. Do we do this every time?

If this really is a catastrophic pandemic event like in 1918 or worse it might be worth it. But where do we draw the line in the future? I don’t think we’ve been given any guidance on that. I hope in a month or two we are told more, because we need to know these things for the future.

I think Fauci and Redfield basically said that in that New England Journal of Medicine piece of theirs that came out the other day.

I just can’t match up the unprecedented response to this with the numbers. And the bigger question is are we going to do this every time something like this pops up or even looks like it might? Why would you ever risk starting a restaurant or other small business if the govt could destroy you on a whim?

I certainly don’t know, either, whether these measures were worth it. I’m not sure we’ll ever know, unfortunately.

But as far as the flu causing many deaths over a longer period goes – in a bad flu year I’m not even sure that’s true (and I don’t mean just in a pandemic year). Flu is seasonal, which means it tends to strike in certain months, although the exact months can vary somewhat. Some flu seasons are longer than others. October or November through some time in the spring would be typical, and most of the cases and most of the deaths would occur then.

So let’s say there’s a year in which 30K people die of the flu in the US. To get the number of deaths per month in flu season you can’t just divide by 12 and get 2500. It might be better to divide by 6 and get 5000. It’s hard to find exact figures of the distribution of deaths throughout the year – at least I haven’t found them yet.

However, let’s look at the 2017-2018 season, which was a bad flu year in which there were apparently 61,000 flu deaths in the US:

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began counting the 2017–2018 “flu season” as October 2017, and by early February 2018, the epidemic was still widespread and increasing overall. By February 2018, the CDC said that the circulating virus strains included both B strains (Yamagata and Victoria), H1N1 and H3N2. On 10 February 2018, Fortune reported that influenza in the United States was killing up to 4,000 Americans a week, likely to far outstrip the rate of deaths in the 2009–2010 season.

Four thousand Americans a week at peak. An average over the approximately 6 months of flu season of about 2541 a week, by my estimate.

Right now, after 2 months of COVID being in the US, the total deaths from the disease are 2484. The equivalent of one week’s worth of the 2018 flu season. Of course, I expect the pace to quicken, but how much? And of course, we’ve been doing the social distancing intervention for a few weeks, and that affects everything. But I don’t see why people pooh-pooh the comparison to the flu. I’ve even heard some epidemiologists saying it will be likely to be like a bad flu season.

My main argument is that I do think the social distancing and the closing of most crowd gathering businesses and spots is not wrong. I don’t think it’s overreacting. Although it sucks – our economy is taking a hit. But I think we’re doing the right thing. I really don’t believe the country will be ready to open businesses by Easter. If it was like the flu we probably would be ready to re-open again. Let’s see where we are in a month.

I thought those projections looked overly pessimistic for NY in light of the current data so I didn’t use them. OTOH, they may just be just be ahead of schedule. We will see.

“With those inputs, the computer models project a total of 81,114 deaths in the U.S. over the next four months. Most of those deaths are expected to occur during April, peaking at more than 2,300 deaths per day. That rate is projected to drop below 10 deaths per day sometime between May 31 and June 6.
“If the forecast proves correct, that suggests a dramatic upswing in the U.S. outbreak.”
“The UW team’s predictions are couched in statistical caveats. For example, the death toll projection of 81,114 has a 95% confidence interval of 7,977 to 251,059 deaths.”

https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections