Back on May 4th, Banks and I posted about the internal Trump admin projections for deaths, which I am pleased to say we have missed by a wide margin, thus far - 200,000 new cases per day, 3,000 deaths per day.
But the IHME's model, as reported by the NYT that day said:
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington is now estimating that there will be nearly 135,000 deaths in the United States through the beginning of August — more than double what it forecast on April 17, when it estimated 60,308 deaths by Aug. 4. (The country has already had more than 68,000 deaths.)
The institute wrote that the revisions reflected “rising mobility in most U.S. states as well as the easing of social distancing measures expected in 31 states by May 11, indicating that growing contacts among people will promote transmission of the coronavirus.”
They "only" underestimated by ~20,000 deaths with their then newly doubled fatalities projection.
But the president the day before that "“We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people.” We hit that 100,000 mark 19 days later.
NA shared the projection below on June 16th. We'd need to have roughly 750 deaths per day over the next two months to get there. As I noted in response to him, their model projected that we would dip, then rise to 1,400 daily fatalities by October 1st.
We're running 1,100 deaths per day (over the last week) at the moment, though that comes after three consecutive days that averaged 1,464. The good news is that if we remain at that 1,100 figure, we'd
still be 20,000 above the projection.
The bad news is if we continue at anything like the current rate of increase.... or if all we see is another lull followed by yet another crest in cases and deaths.
And we don't have the foggiest, in truth, if that's going to happen.
Projecting 200,000 deaths by October:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/16/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday/index.html