Why 100,000 Deaths from Covid 19 in the USA?

Charles Morris
6 min readApr 3, 2020

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Why are they saying that the USA could have over 100,000 deaths? The evening news doesn’t have time to go into detail and explain why. For those that wonder how they come up with such high numbers, I’ll be explaining it here, to the best of my ability. I want to stress that anyone can find out this same info just by tracking the numbers on your own and creating logical projections. It’s not rocket science, it just takes time.

I use the same numbers that the news agencies are using. What I do that is a bit different is that I track new deaths per day for selected countries instead of overall new cases discovered by testing. On the whole, here in the USA, we are mainly testing people who are already sick. That means that our numbers of who actually has the illness is severely underreported. All the graphs that I make are generated from spreadsheet data that I put into Google sheets for daily death totals. And all my data is taken from reliable sources and cross checked. All the graphs and sheets are free to look at. The links are included.

My main chart tracks new deaths for each day from Covid19. I lined up the countries on this chart from each country’s respective Day 1… the first day that they recorded their first Covid19 related death. It allows one to compare, for example…what was happening on Day 24 in every graphed country. It allows one to look for trends and patterns.

For example in the chart above I had graphed the numbers for S. Korea, Iran, Italy, China and the USA. The highest rate of daily deaths anywhere in the world at that point was 368 people and was in Italy. That was Italy’s 24th Day. On their Day 24 we here in the USA were still only on our Day 17. We had 18 deaths that day.

The graph above (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQXlzTAyBSP1vHdIiz1KT9J67Bj_1qgupXtx4ijC8CN3GYBak-iyqC9hcASRoYqUqbfqgwWVMYNXXLd/pubhtml)is where things are as of now on April 1…and the highest daily death rate is now in the USA and has been recorded at 1049 on a single day. It only took 16 days to go from 18 deaths in a single day to 1049 in a single day. 1049 persons dying in a single day in a country is now the highest rate of daily deaths of any country on a single day from Covid19.

You will also notice on this chart above from April 1 that I have added Spain, France and the UK to the chart. What can be learned from this chart?

Here are some things that I notice:

  1. Spain experienced a profoundly early onset followed closely by Italy.
  2. By Day 17 both countries were already experiencing over 100 deaths per day
  3. If you go into the spreadsheet view (link above) you will see cells marked green. This indicates the date of a massive public gathering in a certain country. We know that after a lot of community spread that soon after there will be symptoms and hospitalizations beginning in a 10–14 day range. For these countries marked with green cells huge festivals and sporting events occured and are thought to be a leading cause of these accelerations for Spain and Italy.
  4. Iran 12 days ago-over 1 million Iranians took to traveling to visit families for their New Year’s. This means it’s very likely their numbers will begin to climb in the next few days.
  5. I think it’s interesting that France stayed quite low until nearly a month had passed. I have no idea how or why.
  6. The UK is trending sharply upwards.
  7. China is not on this chart any longer but the highest daily death rate reported from them ever was 150 persons.

Now to a third chart-the 50 DAY LOCKDOWN COUNTDOWN.

On this chart (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQafeKKC9ddkeS4Sn0A8zvme5P3yB3XSvqPneUqsD1qEceZohYl-Z1wInAcAR-5pv__Vv44Pps7aI3s/pubhtml)I set certain countries on the graph beginning at the time of their lockdown or stay at home orders that were nationwide. I have China on this chart because life there is returning to normal now…and it took them about 50 days from Lockdown in Hubei, where Wuhan is…to come out of stay at home orders. Many are now questioning if China’s reports of deaths were accurate. But what isn’t in question is that they had a lockdown for about 50 days…and now life is getting back to normal. I wanted to know how are other countries doing in terms of this possible 50 day window?

Now, we all know that around the world there are still people that have been ignoring these orders. But this graph assumes that the majority of people are doing the right thing and staying put and away from others. If everyone is staying inside…and contact is not spreading it any longer…then it’s supposedly a waiting game for 10–14 days, right? The theory is that if everyone stays inside for that long, then everyone who would develop symptoms requiring hospitalization would do so…but that it wouldn’t spread farther. In China it looks like that process still took 50 days…not two weeks (which is the oft touted period of sequestering needed) but 7 weeks.

My main point on this graph though is that if you don’t have lockdown you don’t have control over anything.

France, UK, Italy, Spain, China, S. Korea had it…
What varies widely is how long each country waited before starting lockdown:
Spain waited 14 days and had 342 deaths
China waited 15 days and had 25 deaths the day they started lockdown
UK waited 16 days and had 175 deaths
Italy waited 22 days and had 1259 deaths
France waited 33 days and had 176 deaths
S. Korea waited 3 days and had 2 deaths-the true outlier.

USA is on Day 33 with 5,101 deaths and still no countrywide lockdown order (and 10 states that specifically won’t issue lockdown)

So this brings me to a main point about the USA and why you keep hearing such dire predictions on the news. It’s all here in the numbers.

Look at Italy and Spain. 17 days after lockdown they are nearly matched with around 900 deaths per day. That’s after 17 days of staying at home!

That’s after they cut off the oxygen to Covid19, those numbers still climbed about 350%.

Then you come to the USA…I added the USA to this graph starting from Day 1 of when the first death occurred but not from lockdown…because we don’t have one yet. It’s been added as a control study for out of control Covid19 spread.

What happens if we magically did start lockdown today?

If we project out 350% growth 17 days from today (as borrowed from Italy and Spain)we would be at 3,672 people dying in a single day on April 18. If we assume 1000 deaths for every day until that day…best case scenario? Between now and including April 18th we’d still see at least 20,000 deaths.

The point being that our medical system is already overwhelmed with the 5,101 deaths we have had so far.

And if we take 50 days, like it did for China, to come out on the other side of this, then you can start to see how they come up claiming how we could have 100,000 deaths in this country. We aren’t even close to containment and right now containment is the only thing that works. Our 50 day window of containment has not even started and we are now at over 1000 deaths per day.

We need lockdown now. We need everyone to take this seriously. We need everyone to take social distancing as a matter of life and death. We need testing for everyone. We need to stop the spread.

Other sources: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

I can be emailed with questions or comments at thevideoslab at gmail

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Charles Morris
Charles Morris

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