It was an unusual moment of frankness from the White House on Monday when the coronavirus task force offered new estimates of the toll the virus might exact on the American public. By holding firm on social distancing efforts,
we were told, we might limit the number of deaths from the virus to somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000 over the course of the pandemic. It’s a grim tally, but better than the millions that might die should the country not follow the offered recommendations.
The peak of the outbreak would come in the middle of April, task force member Deborah Birx explained. She showed a graph using modeling from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). The projected peak would come on April 15, with 2,214 deaths on that day.
Late Wednesday night, the IHME released revised estimates, based on new data. During the first wave of the epidemic, its model
projects, the death toll will be 93,765 — an increase of 14 percent from its model the previous day. That’s just the first wave, looking at the number of deaths through July. In the fall and winter, the virus is expected to reemerge and pose a significant threat once again. That shift is a function in part of things looking more bleak over the short term. The new model suggests that the number of deaths each day is now most likely to peak on April 16, a day later than suggested Monday, with 400 more deaths that day.
In other words, the data from Monday have been shifted upward significantly — particularly the worst-case scenario represented by the upper-bound of the uncertainty area displayed on the graph. The graph presented from the White House on Monday stopped at about 3,500 deaths a day. The new estimate projects a possible worst-case peak of 4,400 deaths on April 21.
