I wanted to highlight a few Covid-related #'s that I have been watching closely over the past week. I'll start w/ the more hopeful news.

Over the past 2 weeks, the daily growth rate of Covid-related deaths in the US has been declining. It's still high & the next several weeks will be awful, but a continued steady decline in the growth rate would be welcome news.

Note: To smooth out day-to-day reporting variation, each point in the graph is based on deaths recorded over previous 5 day window. Data is from @COVID19Tracking

On the down side, I also want to highlight some key #'s from this article for those (still) pushing the idea that Covid might not be too deadly:

1. Based on official estimates, almost 0.2% of the population of Bergamo, IT died in March 2020 from Covid. https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-coronavirus-death-toll-is-far-higher-than-reported-11585767179

2. The # of actual Covid-related deaths is likely at least 2x greater, based on estimates of excess deaths in March 2020 compared to 2015-19. That's a >0.4% population death rate.

2. (cont) While a small fraction of these excess deaths might be due to unrelated factors, the vast majority are likely unidentified Covid cases because Italy (& many other countries) is only including those who have died in hospitals after a positive test in official counts.

3. The total # of deaths in Bergamo (& across Italy) is still growing every day - although, thankfully, the # of new deaths each day has leveled off and started to decline over the past week.

4. Putting (1)-(3) together, the true population death rate in Bergamo is likely to be at least 0.6% by the time the first wave of the pandemic is fully under control in Italy.

5. And this is the population death rate _conditional_ on the social restrictions that have been in place in Bergamo beginning in late February, before being extended nationwide on March 9th. The rate would likely be much higher if the virus had continued to spread unchecked.

6. To put things in perspective, a 0.6% population death rate in the US would mean 2M deaths. Despite the initial delays in taking this seriously, hopefully our efforts to slow the virus spread & ramp up hospital capacity will keep the US from getting anywhere close to that #.

All of this is to say: please ignore anyone arguing that Covid-19 may have already spread to much of the population & that the fatality rate might be very low. The population death rates in Bergamo & other cities/provinces across Europe attest to just how deadly this disease is.