US milestone of 100,000 virus deaths likely by June
05 May, 2020
US President Donald Trump now says his worst-case coronavirus scenario will be 100,000 deaths, but the country will probably reach that grim milestone by the following month, according to several scientific models -- none which predict a summertime halt to the virus's spread.
"We will lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 to 100,000 people. That is clearly a horrible thing," Trump said Sunday evening at a virtual town hall meeting on Fox News.
The Republican incumbent, who's vying for re-election in November, argued that without lockdown measures which may have crippled the world's biggest economy, the toll could have been far greater -- a lot more than 1.2 million "at a minimum."
But Trump's end-game figure is probable far lower compared to the reality -- his own White House says 100,000 to 240,000 Americans will die from COVID-19, the condition due to the virus.
The country has already seen 68,000 confirmed deaths, and has confirmed about 30,000 new cases a day since early April. The type of the epidemic is in a way that more bleak figures are inevitable.
"My personal best guess is that people will reach 100,000 deaths around the start of June," Nicholas Reich, a co-employee professor of biostatistics at the University of Massachusetts, told AFP.
Reich's lab has looked at several major epidemiological models created by other institutions to come up with the average trajectory for the epidemic's development.
That average curve indicates america can expect to hit 90,000 deaths by May 23. An upcoming update should extend the predictions through the finish of May.
"We're seeing pretty constantly somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 deaths a week -- there aren't a whole lot of reasons to anticipate it will drop quickly," Reich said.
Of nine models cited on May 1 by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least three of these predicted that 100,000 fatalities will be recorded in four weeks' time.
Few current models exceed a four-week window, given the uncertainty of the situation.
Some are more optimistic: the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington predicts a total of 72,000 deaths by June 1, but its authors have said they plan to revise their methodology.
Others -- including two come up with by Columbia University in NY -- say the 100,000 mark will be long past by June 1.
One from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology bets on 113,000 deaths by June 1.
Of course, all of these forecasts come with the most common margin of error -- sometimes totaling tens of thousands of deaths.
Big country
Epidemiologists constantly caution that no model ought to be taken on its own, as all are built based on different hypotheses.
The most difficult factor to element in is how persons will behave over the coming months.
Will they wear masks in public areas? How many will keep working from home? Just how many "non-essential" trips will persons make to stores or restaurants? When will the united states return to pre-pandemic standards of going out, or does it ever?
"We're at an inflection point right now, where some states are opening up, plus some aren't," Reich said.
"There's an added layer of uncertainty. [...] This is a complex system with a whole lot of human behavior that's changing daily."
In the usa, the initial hotspots like NY and New Jersey have already been replaced by new ones. In Texas, Illinois and the united states capital, the quantity of new cases keeps growing.
In California and Florida, that number is needs to level off. The vastness of the country makes the situation more difficult.
"The US isn't an individual epidemic. It's happening differently in lots of different places," William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, told AFP.
To show the behavioral dissimilarities in urban and rural zones, or northern and southern zones, researchers in Philadelphia created models for 211 different US counties.
"The epicenters of today might not exactly be the epicenters of tomorrow," said David Rubin, your physician at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who also teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
His team identified heat as a moderating factor. That may help keep carefully the death toll down, but he warned: "Temperature alone won't save you."
Even in warmer parts of the country like Miami and Texas, "we see evidence that the chance remains," Rubin said.
Source: www.thejakartapost.com