Fool Me Once

On December 2, Joe Biden announced there may be 250,000 further deaths due to COVID between 'now and January'. Now, Joe has had a history of adding a zero here and there to his estimates, but this one was widely published without challenge, and at least 250,000 isn't 250,000,000. But is even this number remotely reasonable?

It took eight months, between March and the end of October, for the US to reach a total of 250,000 COVID deaths. And keep in mind that health authorities throughout this time have repeated that COVID deaths are calculated as any death in which the decedent tested positive for COVID, whatever the underlying cause. Someone killed in a skydiving accident would be a COVID death if he tested positive. Someone who died in a hospice from terminal cancer would be a COVID death that way.

On December 5, there were 2,190 COVID deaths that day in the US. which seems to be generally consistent with the totals in recent weeks. (The numbers jump around in the low four figures.) Since this is December 9, we have 22 days remaining in December.

If COVID deaths continue at the December 5 rate, there will be only 48,180 deaths between now and January, not 250,000. This is off by 80%. Put another way, for there to be 250,000 deaths between now and January, there would need to be over 11,000 US deaths per day. The trend since Joe's announcement on December 2 has nevertheless been chatter in the low four figures. We aren't seeing these numbers.

Actually, this is the classic "if present trends continue" fallacious argument that used to be taught in middle school.

Let's recall that last March, the Imperial College COVID model, which drove early US policy, forecast 2 million US deaths. Joe seems to be making forecasts based on similar premises, which, within even a week of his making them, are pretty clearly not proving out.

Another issue from last March is the estimates of hospital ICU capacity that drove President Trump to send Navy hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles. The original intent, recall, was for them to provide additional intensive care capacity to allow local hospitals to devote their own units to the predicted flood of COVID patients. But the flood never materialized, and the ships were not actualy needed. As of late April, the Mercy "had treated a few dozen non-coronavirus patients for everything from heart and lung conditions to gastrointestinal problems," and it left Los Angeles in May.

However, Gov Newsom is using what appear to be similar wildly inflated estimates of ICU capacity to impose a new lockdown on California. This appears to disregard normal hospital practice and seems to be a repeat of the wild overestimates from last March:

In any given year, most parts of California reach 90% ICU capacity in December. This is usually due to the surge in flu cases, but the flu is allegedly non-existent this year, replaced on paper by the more lucrative COVID-19 diagnoses preferred by hospitals. They knew it was coming, which is why they made moves separate from the state to increase ICU capacity. But without the state’s help, there was no way they were going to stay below the Governor’s 85% threshold. And they were okay with that.

Dr. Brad Spellberg, Chief Medical Officer at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, said, “Where we typically run well above 90% of our ICU beds occupancy because we’re such a busy trauma center. And this is taking us to almost capacity.”

In other words, in California, ICU capacity never falls below 90% in December, so why treat 2020 as an emergency? In addition, hospitals do reconfigure their facilities to meet demand in any case. It's completely unclear why a lockdown is needed to avert a problem that is quite possibly non-existent. Newsom justifies the lockdown based on "projections" and "models", but it's unclear how those differ from the ones that sent unneeded hospital ships to New York and Los Angeles last March.

But last spring, people thought this was a completely new situation and took the authorities' word for things.

Fool me twice, shame on me.