What 200,000 Daily Cases by June 1 Means

Numerous web sites have mentioned a report by the New York Times that the Trump administration projects an increase in  COVID-19 infections to 200,000 per day by June 1, and an increase in daily COVID-19 deaths to 3,000. The information has been repeated on conservative web sites like the National Review, and on liberal web sites like the Guardian.  Here is what the guardian wrote:

I have not seen the FEMA chart or the CDC models (both of which probably only have seen shared in "top secret" meetings), but it is easy enough to adopt my computer model to give the same numbers:

Basically, the model assumes that the reproduction number R increase to 2.4 because restrictions are lifted. That is substantially less than the R of 5 during the initial phase of the epidemic, but a bit more pessimistic than what I had used in my recent post "The Cost of Making COVID-19 Disappear". But the higher R is needed to get about 200,000 daily cases and 3,000 daily deaths by the end of the months.

Some of you may have noticed that the projected number of cases is about 6-8 times higher than during the last week, while the projected deaths are only 1.5 to 2 times higher.  Looking at the graph above, you can see why: because an increase in deaths always follows the increase in cases with a significant delay - typically about 10 days to two weeks. Another way of looking at this is to compare the number of deaths and cases the US is currently reporting: about 69,000 deaths for 1.2 million cases. All else being equal, that would mean a daily number of 200,000 cases should (eventually) lead to about 69,000 * 200,000 / 1,200,000 = 11,500 daily deaths.

But as the graph above shows, the number of daily cases and deaths is still rapidly increasing at the end of the month. Let's run the model a bit longer, and see what happens:

The number of daily cases will continue to rise to more than 800,000 cases per day before it starts dropping. The number of COVID-19 death is predicted to rise to more than 60,000 per day by the model. Note that the model does not consider the effect of shortages of ICU beds which would lead to even more deaths.

Here is a look at the total predicted number of cases and deaths:

The total number of confirmed cases would exceed 30 million. The total number of deaths would be more than 2 million.

We know that the administration is pushing ahead with "re-opening" plans while being fully aware that the number of deaths will increase to 3,000 per day within a month. Even if the number would stabilize at this level, it would still correspond to 90,000 deaths per month: roughly the combined total death toll of the Korean War and the Vietnam war in a single month.

In all likelihood, though, the daily death toll will increase to significantly higher numbers. The administration knows this, and is pushing ahead with "re-opening" plans anyway. It values "the economy" higher than the life of a million Americans (or two).