I saw one estimate saying that one million Americans could die from Covid-19. I have no idea if this is true and it is possible the number of deaths is more like a flu in the end. At least I hope so.
On a positive note, the doomsday modelers in the UK, at least, are walking back their predictions -- by A LOT.
500,000 predicted deaths in the UK to 20,000, and by extension to the US, 2.2 million down to 85,000, which is in the range for an seasonal flu -- and the flu has a vaccine.
This is from today's Corona virus Task Force briefing at the White House (emphasis added):
Dr. Deborah Birx: (51:35)
I’m sure many of you saw the recent report out of the UK about them adjusting completely their needs. This is really quite important. If you remember, that was the report that said
there would be 500,000 deaths in the UK, and 2.2 million deaths in the United States. They have adjusted that number in the UK to 20,000, so half a million to 20,000. We are looking at this in great detail to understand that adjustment.
I am going to say something that is a little complicated, but I am going to say it in a way we can all understand it together. In the model, either you have to have a large group who are asymptomatic, who have never presented for any test in order to have the kind of numbers that were predicted, to get to 60 million people infected or have six million people infected, you have to have a large group of asymptomatics. Because in no country to date have we seen an attack rate over one in a thousand. So either we’re only measuring the tip of the iceberg of the symptomatic cases, and underneath it are a large group of people.
So we’re working very hard to get that antibody test because that’s a good way to figure out who are all these people under here and do they exist? Or we have the transmission completely wrong.
So these are the things we’re looking at because the predictions of the models don’t match the reality on the ground in either China, South Korea or Italy. We are about five times the size of Italy (in population).
So if we were Italy and you did all those divisions, Italy should have close to 400,000 deaths. They’re not close to achieving that. So these are the kinds of things we’re trying to understand. Models are models. We’re adapting now to the react… There’s enough data now of the real experience with the coronavirus on the ground to really make these predictions much more sound. So when people start talking about 20% of a population getting infected, it’s very scary. But we don’t have data that matches that based on the experience.