Deaths so far is an astonishingly bad metric to use for this, it's analogous to 63 grains of rice on the 6th day of the classic chessboard story.
If we don't do drastic measures, many experts are citing numbers in the high hundreds of thousands to over a million (example [1], which is well worth reading). But if we do act, the experience of China, South Korea, and Singapore teach us that we can do better.
It is not the case that "many experts are citing numbers in the high hundreds of thousands to a million people". From the blog post you've cited (and which I agree is thoughtful, and which I had already read when another friend sent it my way a couple hours ago): "There are no experts. There are only good people trying their best to sift through the raft of information coming in extremely fast."
But the numbers you've cited do not represent a mainstream view in the papers currently being reviewed and published as far as I can tell.
...and for that matter, take some time to consider generally the resources on CIDRAP; they are one of the few academic centers that seem to be actually focused on science instead of hype. http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/
Thanks for the article link and the reference to CIDRAP. I'm trying to take in a lot of information, especially views dissenting from the mainstream. These are useful resources.
> It is not the case that "many experts are citing numbers in the high hundreds of thousands to a million people".
You are objectively wrong on this. The UCSF panel on 3/10 presented an estimate with a range of 1.5 million on the high side. Dr. Osterholm said on the Joe Rogan podcast,
"We conservatively estimate that this could require 48 million hospitalizations, and over 480,000 deaths over the next 3-7 months." The Imperial report warns of up to 2.2 million in the US, and even with mitigations in place a large number of fatalities. Not one of the epidemiologists I follow on Twitter has called this estimate into question, and many have praised the report.
Nobody has the real answers, and we all have to do our best interpreting the evidence that's out there, but making shit up is not helpful.
edit: OK, wow, I realize that I did indeed misinterpret Osterholm's statement on the podcast - at first listen, I thought he was discussing worldwide numbers. You are correct; his warning, based on the American Hospital Assocation, is 480k deaths in the United States.
As best I can tell, he is citing the "leaked webinar" for hospital prep from the American Hospital Association. I can't find this document or other interpretations of it.
But yeah, I was dead wrong about what he said.
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Ahh, gotcha.
I think there's some confusion about what we're talking about.
I thought you were talking about a number of deaths in the USA (ie, compared to my pointing to the approximately 40k traffic deaths).
480k deaths, the CIDRAP estimate cited by Osterholm (which, by the way, I can't find a PDF for - do you happen to have a link), is unlikely to include more than 40k US deaths; I don't think there has ever been a pandemic where the US accounted for 9% of the worldwide deaths, has there?
For example, the 2009 H1N1 outbreak saw 284,000 deaths worldwide, with 12,000 in the USA. [0]
> The Imperial report warns of up to 2.2 million in the US, and even with mitigations in place a large number of fatalities.
We might need help interpreting the 2.2 million number - it is described as the calculation of an "unmitigated pandemic", and appears to take the worst death rate for each age group observed worldwide and combining it with the "cumulative ICU cases trigger" (the report loses me here), and then simply applying it to the USA population.
In other words, I don't think it's meant as a prediction, but a ceiling to define the parameters of the report.
If we don't do drastic measures, many experts are citing numbers in the high hundreds of thousands to over a million (example [1], which is well worth reading). But if we do act, the experience of China, South Korea, and Singapore teach us that we can do better.
[1] https://tincture.io/dispatch-4-from-the-front-lines-79c74fa6...
(I want to link https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/notes-from-ucsf-expert-panel-... which actually does give numbers, but that might no longer be available)