coronavirus task force relied on that model and a number of others, including one from the University of Washington. When Trump extended the closure recommendations by 30 days on March 31, members of his task force revealed a forecast, based on many models. Even with social distancing and other mitigations, it showed, the coronavirus would kill between 100,000 and 240,000 people over some unspecified period of time.
That number was stunning. The death toll was still less than 4,000 nationally.
The forecast now looks well-founded, with hundreds of deaths added daily and a vaccine or reliable therapeutic treatment still probably far in the future… The decision by Trump to order an initial 15-day national shutdown came March 16, when the country had reported only 85 deaths, according to a Washington Post tally. Models — however imperfect and dependent upon assumptions that might be incorrect — gave political leaders and the public an accurate sense of the likely scale of the COVID-19 epidemic facing the nation…
One common misperception today is that scientists oppose the reopening of the economy. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a television interview Friday that if stay-at-home orders were imposed for long, it would cause “irreparable damage,” but he urged people to “please proceed with caution.”
Jeffrey Shaman, an influential epidemiologist at Columbia University, said that the health of the economy matters, and that the nation needs to restore economic activity in a way that keeps people safe. “We have to do both those things,” Shaman said. “We want a functioning economy, and we don’t want people getting sick.”
MacDailyNews Take: Of course, no once can predict the future, so the early models offered a very wide range of possibilities, including a higher COVID-19 death rate. So, it’s great news that 99.74% of people (and likely 99.87% of people outside of nursing homes) who encounter SARS-CoV-2 do not die from COVID-19. As more and more data gets added to what’s known about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, we, and, specifically, businesses like Apple with their large network of physical retail stores, will have a clearer picture about how to wisely proceed with reopening and resumption of “normal” life.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]