"Our forecast now is 74,000 deaths. That's our best estimate." Dr. Chris Murray, director of the IHME, whose model was promulgated by the White House. (April 28, 2020)
"The model estimate is pure hokum." "That number is laughable. How stupid do they think we are?" Bob Dietz (April 29, 2020)
Today, May 7th, we passed 75,000 American deaths due to COVID-19. We didn't make it to the IHME's August 4th date. We didn't even make it to the end of May.
The nonsensical U.S. death projections put forth by the White House and its de rigueur model have hit a brick wall called reality. The brutality of the last week has exposed these projections as lies and misdirection. The "fake figures" were all a holding strategy, a cynical method of lying week after week hoping to desensitize an American public to the mounting toll. A toll that sprinted past 9/11, climbed above Vietnam deaths, and is now projected by that IHME model to reach 134,000 by August 4th, which is an arbitrary date that serves no real purpose other than to create an illusory end point.
The 134,000 deaths matches the number who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. In no way does that figure reflect the pandemic's final American toll. It merely points us to the scoreboard for the end of the first quarter.
Two months of lies and blatantly ludicrous projections gained the administration what exactly? It gained them desensitization. Unfortunately, there was also a cost. The downplaying of deaths-to-come undoubtedly led to less stringent public adherence to stay-at-home and lockdowns. The lies led to more social interaction. They led to more illness. The bottom line is that lying led to more dying.
This massaging of the American public was telling people what they wanted to hear rather than what they needed to know. When you are making life and death decisions for you and your family, certainly your government should owe you the best available information. What we got was trash. The projections the White House fed us for two months were a crock. The only saving grace was that they were so ridiculously wrong that they were an obvious crock.
The day after my Innumeracy Lunacy entry, American media finally woke up and began consulting models other than the White House favorite. They had no choice; the IHME projections had been that wrong. The snowballing death toll had become so large that no president at a podium could hide it behind "fake numbers" any longer. CNN chimed in with its May 2nd feature report The Pandemic and The President. Michael Osterholm's sober analyses finally appeared everywhere in American print. Reality rained stone after stone at the administration's funhouse mirror projections. In the span of 48 hours, the mirrors lay shattered. In this generation's most dire hour, we learned that the emperor had been wearing no factual clothes the entire time.
At least now, we have real numbers, or something approaching that, going forward. Osterholm, for example, does not treat us with kid gloves. We can make personal choices based on some sense of what is likely ahead.
The innumeracy has been exposed. The horror, however, has just begun.
Bob Dietz
May 7, 2020
