(TINY THREAD) I want to explain in a bit more detail the reason there was concern about the (now disproven) claims made by the IHME authors last week that last week would be the peak of COVID-19 deaths. We don& #39;t know when the peak will be—but today has been the deadliest day yet.

1/ We have been told by medical experts—and everything I write about comes right from experts—that most of those recorded as having died from COVID-19 are dying after being placed on a ventilator, and that the time from infection to a fatality of this sort is roughly 18.5 days.

2/ Public data reveal when sudden bumps in daily infection rates came:

March 21–March 22: +4,500
March 25–March 26: +4,000
March 30–March 31: +4,000
April 1–April 2: +3,500

That final bump put the U.S. over 30,000 new infections daily, which is roughly where we& #39;ve stayed since.

3/ Of *course* some percentage of these four bumps were due to increased testing: people who weren& #39;t *very* sick, and wouldn& #39;t have been tested at all prior to the US testing regimen expanding. But some of these folks had to be the newly very sick who would end up on ventilators.

4/ What the IHME model authors never publicly explained is why these bumps wouldn& #39;t show up in increased death tolls approximately 18.5 days later, as experts say fatalities are a "lagging indicator" due to the 18.5-day course of the virus for someone who ends up on a ventilator.

5/ Adding ~19 days to the 4 bumps would suggest the following:

March 21–March 22 https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="▶️" title="Right-pointing triangle" aria-label="Emoji: Right-pointing triangle"> April 9–April 10 death toll rise
March 25–March 26 https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="▶️" title="Right-pointing triangle" aria-label="Emoji: Right-pointing triangle"> April 13–April 14 death toll rise
March 30–March 31 https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="▶️" title="Right-pointing triangle" aria-label="Emoji: Right-pointing triangle"> April 18–April 19 death toll rise
April 1–April 2 https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="▶️" title="Right-pointing triangle" aria-label="Emoji: Right-pointing triangle"> April 20–April 21 death toll rise

6/ If you count 18 days instead, you& #39;d expect the first death-toll bump around April 8 (just a rough estimate—surely it could be April 6, 7, 10, 11).

And what happened on April 7? A massive death-toll spike—up 700 in daily deaths—that looked tied to the earlier infection spikes.

7/ You& #39;d then expect a *second* death-toll spike—per the data—to come somewhere between April 12 and April 16.

And what& #39;s happened today, April 14? A second massive death-toll spike—up yet again (so far) about 700 deaths—and once again it looks tied to earlier infection spikes.

8/ Meanwhile, the IHME model—which constantly self-deletes earlier projections and so always appears "correct"—originally proposed a peak in deaths last week that would (unlike what we& #39;ve seen everywhere else) *not* "plateau" but steadily decline. That disparity wasn& #39;t explained.

9/ Over and over and over again I& #39;ve said simply that *the experts need to better explain things*. I& #39;m not an expert. But I watch the experts avidly, and none are explaining why infection spikes don& #39;t cause death spikes and why or how we are different from Italy (re: plateauing).

10/ So far the basic data experts are putting out on daily infections/deaths and the infection-to-case closure timeline is *predicting* fatalities—whereas the IHME model isn& #39;t. All I want is for experts to explain things better to those of us—including me—who aren& #39;t experts. /end