By our way of counting, this is Day 120 of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our first USA case was identified in Washington State on Day 21 of the pandemic. In those next 99 days (14 weeks) the United States as of 2:05 P.M. on 4/28/20 had 1,004,908 known COVID-19 PCR positive infected patients and 57,812 deaths giving us a still rising death rate of 5.75%. We have 772,780 more COVID-19 positive infected patients than any other country in the world. The total number of COVID-19 positive infected patients in Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom is 921,450 or 83,458 fewer infected patients then the United States. By our modeling, we should reach 2,000,000 COVID-19 positive infected patients in 34.5 days (828 hours or 5 weeks).
As of 4/28/20:
USA World
57,812 deaths 215,461 deaths
1,004,908 infections 3,094,829 infections
Death rate: 5.75% Death Rate: 6.96%
One thing that concerns us is that the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics said last week that we would have 67,641 deaths from COVID-19. This was updated today to a nice round number of 74,000 deaths by August. Their prediction is that we will have this number of total deaths in 93 days.
We think we have a more accurate prediction. We used two simple methods to predict the number of deaths and came up with two numbers: in 34.5 days (828 hours or 5 weeks) we should have either 56,166 additional deaths or 57,004 additional deaths from COVID-19. Therefore, I would predict that 5 weeks from today (April 28, 2020), the total number of deaths in the United States will be either 112,641 deaths or 113,479 deaths. Let’s review this in 5 weeks.
Again I’m going to leave it up to each of you to decide whether we’ve done a good job in this pandemic. Please think globally and act locally.
David C. Wright, M.D. 