Coronavirus Death Toll Estimation USA

Depends on timeline and administration decisions. Optimistically, maybe as low as 100k this year, 200k with retrospective analysis.

I say "administrative decisions" because no one has really articulated a viable middleground between permanent lockdown and BAU. If we do full BAU, we maybe lose ~100k people a week for a few months. If we do full lockdown, everyone that could be saved by modern medicine is saved. Treatment supposedly decreases mortality rates substantially (5-10x?)

The best strategy is probably to relax some social distancing things when our hospitals recover some capacity and ease back into it, but you are still going to see a ton of COVID deaths even if you don't overwhelm the hospitals.

I am wildly uncertain about how this administration will handle things. I think if Trump doesn't declare coronavirus over and out us back on BAU by June then he will defer to Fauci through the election and we are probably looking at the lower end of the range of current possibilities. If he decides that BAU by June is the best option for him politically, our death toll will be over a million easily. I don't think it is actually likely that he goes back to BAU, though, at least in part because he lost initiative to the states and cannot unilaterally restore it.

How is 18k even remotely possible when we are already almost to 10k and losing 1k per day?

No vaccines will be available in the next 8 days no

I would bet quite a bit on no vaccine or treatment beyond current symptom mitigation within the year.

Biology is hard.

I would say 75,000 Americans by the end of the year.

I'd say 50k outside of the tristate area with a good 200k within.

But it's going to be a big it depends. Right now everyone seems to be doing nothing but 1 size fits all solutions and all or nothing in terms of measures and seize as much power as they can... which can be rather counterproductive even in the short term. Like seriously shutting down all of nature in the middle of nowhere because some popular beaches that are always packed were still packed isn't exactly great for peoples health
But long term eventually (arguably already are) you are going to see civil unrest. And instead of resuming some measure of normality reasonably we will push people to idk have 50 people birthday parties and the like do who knows what with rates

Whatever the official number winds up at the actual death rate will be higher.

Several reasons, the biggest one for us is lack of testing, in other countries its under reporting or deliberate mislabeling like the Russian spike in pneumonia deaths.

I'm going to say 180K official for the USA, 240 real count. I hope I am not among them nor are any of you.

I'm going with 200k with Trump at the helm. If we had an actual politician that understood world affairs and how to handle something of this magnitude, probably 50k-100k would have been more accurate.

Yeah, because what we need the most in this country is an "actual politician". Give me a break.

Is that just New York state deaths? Because if we want to blame New Yorks handling I'd think it's fair to count the New York metropolitan area given well it's a metropolitan area even if it covers parts of a couple other states

Y'all are predicting in a pretty tight range. I would encourage you to spread it out a bit. If we are doing Price is Right rules, 100k is basically the $1 bet.

With full BAU, estimates are that between 20 and 70% of the US would get the virus and death rates are between 2% and 10% depending on the supply of medical treatment. That puts the death count in the US between 1.3 and 23mil.

Lockdown lowers the % infected this year, but it's not clear to me that those people don't just get infected next year, so unless we manage to completely wipe it out (which tbqh doesn't seem possible) really we're buying years of life with the lockdown. Anyway, that's why I put a "this year" boundary on my prediction.

Also, the states *are* leading on this. They aren't required to lead on this and there are more than a few voices pointing out that we need consistent "stay the *** home" guidelines if we want to have any chance of eliminating it.

Without even getting into a constitutional law debate, politically if Trump got 100% on board with the lockdown and set guidelines all resistant states would fall in line and the states that don't like Trump would follow his guideline or do something more stringent.

Can't have consistent guidelines with an area of 4 million square miles.

Alaska can't have the same rules as New york

Why? The divide is based on population density (city/rural), not state-by-state. Even New York would need different regulation for their rural counties compared to NYC, so how is it less complicated to administrate this distinction 50 times on a state-by-state basis?

You have to draw arbitrary cutoffs and then you have to enforce them or they don't work.

99,999 No lockdown
100,000 Stay inside or get shot

Population density matters, but so do a lot of other things.

Suplies per store, stores per human, workers per store, age demographic, weather (not just literally but mental health) homelessness, public transportation(or lack therof) if delivery services exist. probably a dozen more.

Ultimately the implementation needs to be done by the states, of course, each state would need to implement guidelines based on their local needs/respurces. However, one of the resources that varies state to state is "number of epidemiologists."

The federal government has the expertise needed to advise during a pandemic. Make those people work the weekend and release their set of overly complicated technical guidelines, then send them out to the different states to explain it and advise on site.