Turns out the Trump regime's relying on -- and selling -- an overly- optimistic model of coronavirus spread is yet another bungle that will extend the life of the pandemic:
As coronavirus cases climbed daily by the thousands and the nation entered its second month of an economic standstill, President Donald Trump latched onto a sign of hope: A pandemic model closely followed by political leaders and public health specialists projected the virus would kill as few as 60,000 Americans, a figure far below what officials previously feared. [snip]
Trump swiftly adopted the projection from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation as his newest measure of success — while top administration health officials including infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci and coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx touted the lower figure as a clear indication the U.S. was winning its fight with the disease.
“It looks like we’ll be at about a 60,000 mark, which is 40,000 less than the lowest number thought of,” Trump said during a news briefing on Sunday, April 19, adding the next day that “the low number was supposed to be 100,000 people. We could end up at 50 to 60.”
The article details how important it is for policy makers (if you can call some of the crackpots and hacks in the Trump regime that) not to rely too heavily on specific models, particularly ones offering the rosiest scenarios, when making decisions about a virus that no one really understands fully, much less has a grip on.That’s not going to happen. More than 50,000 Americans are dead from the coronavirus already, following several days during which the nation’s death toll routinely topped 2,000. The U.S. is now expected to blow past the 60,000 mark around the beginning of May, earlier than the IHME model had projected and with less of the dramatic leveling-off that its forecast had initially baked in. (our emphasis)
