Dr. Fauci lowers projections of US coronavirus deaths to 60k due to social distancing, but some people aren’t buying it…
Today Dr. Fauci is lowering projections of the potential US coronavirus death toll from 100-200k to 60k:
BLOOMBERG – One of President Donald Trump’s top medical advisers slashed projections for U.S. coronavirus deaths on Thursday, saying that about 60,000 people may die — almost half as many as the White House estimated a week ago.
The falling projection, the result of aggressive social distancing behaviors Americans adopted to curb the spread of the virus, may accelerate Trump’s effort to develop a plan to urge Americans to leave their homes and return to work next month.
“The real data are telling us it is highly likely we are having a definite positive effect by the mitigation things that we’re doing, this physical separation,” Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NBC in an interview.
“I believe we are going to see a downturn in that, and it looks more like the 60,000, than the 100,000 to 200,000” projected fatalities, he said. “But having said that, we better be careful that we don’t say: ‘OK, we’re doing so well we could pull back.’”
Fauci is arguing that lowering of projections is due to the social distancing mitigation across the country.
But others are having serious doubts:
Takes a special kind of mind to demand unquestioning obedience from everyone because of “the data”-
Then when the data is wrong, come up with a story to pretend that it was right all along
“Social distancing” did not change the death projection from 100-250K to 60K in 2 weeks
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) April 9, 2020
Look, maybe total shutdown economy was the *only* way. I have doubts, but I get it, this is a nightmare. I do, however, insist that in a discussion about numbers and data, we are factual about what the numbers and data are.
That this brings out so much hostility is…troubling
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) April 9, 2020
Thread. The projections from the data were wildly off base, but were the basis for this national lockdown. Remember when you hear that social distancing and other measures are why the projections are now being revised down: key data models assumed full social distancing. https://t.co/6lqpbLEpxW
— Brit Hume (@brithume) April 9, 2020
I’m not going to claim to know the answer to this, but what I do know is that as the data gets better, the modeling always gets better. This is something that I remember Dr. Birx and Fauci saying in the past few weeks. The modeling is only as good as the data.
