Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 15. I don’t have anything special to say today, so I thought I’d take a look at my April 28 post that lists a dozen things I tentatively believed about COVID-19. How have those held up?
I’ll revise and extend three of them. On #5, I may have been a little pessimistic. A full suite of countermeasures, rigorously enforced and widely complied with, probably reduces deaths by more than half. Maybe 60-65 percent?
On #8 I was completely wrong. Summer is five weeks away, and it’s obvious we’ll have 150-200,000 deaths by then. In my defense, how could I have guessed that our president would urge everyone to go out and party at the first sign of declining death rates?
On #9, I probably shouldn’t have entertained even the idea of the slightest relaxation of countermeasures.
The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.
