April 3: How many will die?

It's not clear to me whether the number of deaths predicted by the models shown at the WH briefings (100-240K) refer just to "first wave" (up to the "flattening") or to the entire course of the pandemic. I suspect it's just the former. The reason is that, even without modeling sophistication, unchecked epidemics end up affecting a large % of the population.Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, estimates it’s “plausible” that 20 to 60 percent of adults will catch the disease within a year (I have seen more dire estimates). Let's make it 40%, and that's 130M. a 1% death rate would cause 1.3 Million deaths. Social distancing doesn't "kill" the virus, it just prevents it from finding new hosts. Some authorities make it sound like with "flattening" we won the battle. The reality is that it will be the start of a long battle to slowly restart the economy and social "normalcy" while at the same time preventing the virus from "taking off" again. We'll essentially have a chance to do the things (like testing, contact tracing etc.) we should have done back in January. In Wuhan, about a month after the "flattening" they have an app that gives folks a 2 hour "green light " to go shopping, and they cannot enter the store (they give a list to a shop attendant). Non teleworkers go back to the office in small groups and at different times so there are only few people around....etc. I got this info from a report from an Italian who lives there with his wife (the photo with face masks on my last post). The upshot is that the virus will probably continue to "seep" out, hopefully closely checked and contained until a large part of the population will have been infected over time, or we finally get a vaccine. What we do "buy " in any case is the ability of the health system to treat people adequately, AND the possibility of finding effective drugs, which may reduce the death rate, again, until we finally have a vaccine. I am afraid that we'll need to be very creative in our "new normalcy". If you are curious about where we are now w/r to "flattening" our curve, take a look at the gray line in the graph below (all graphs start with the first 100 cases).