Misunderstanding the math, Trump embraced a coronavirus death toll we’ll soon surpass
Misunderstanding the math, Trump embraced a coronavirus death toll we’ll soon surpass
By Philip Bump
April 23, 2020 at 2:18 p.m. EDT
When the White House announced its recommendation last month that Americans refrain from meeting in groups and take other steps to contain the spread of the coronavirus, it presented a chart suggesting that doing so could avoid the worst-case scenario of infections. Without mitigation efforts, models of the spread of the disease estimated that as many as 2.2 million Americans could die of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. With mitigation? A more modest 100,000 to 220,000 deaths. Still a lot, but obviously far better.
It was a hard message for President Trump, for a variety of reasons. No president wants to tell the public that the best-case scenario from a crisis is that hundreds of thousands of people would die. But that’s what the data showed, and so that’s what was presented in defense of urging people to stay home.
As time passed, the models were revised with new information. One leading model used by the White House, created by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, used new information about distancing measures in Europe and the United States to shift its downward estimate for the death toll from 90,000 to a little over 60,000.
Trump relished the change.
With 60,000 deaths, “you can never be happy,” Trump said at a briefing on April 10, shortly after the model revision. “But that’s a lot fewer than we were originally told and thinking. So they said between [100,000] and 220,000 lives on the minimum side, and then up to 2.2 million lives if we didn’t do anything. But it showed a just tremendous resolve by the people of this country. So we’ll see what it ends up being, but it looks like we’re headed to a number substantially below the 100,000. That would be the low mark. And I hope that bears out.”
“We did the right thing,” he said a bit later, “because maybe it would have been 2 million people died instead of whatever that final number will be, which could be 60, could be 70, could be 75, could be 55. Thousands of people have died.”
A week later, the same argument.
“I think we’ll be substantially, hopefully, below the [100,000] number,” he said. “And I think, right now, we’re heading at probably around 60-, maybe 65,000.”
As recently as Monday, Trump again touted this number.
“We did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would have had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe 2 million people dead,” he said. “Now, we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people.”
We are not. We’ll pass 50,000 within days and will likely hit 60,000 deaths by early May. That’s just recorded deaths. The actual death toll will almost certainly be much higher, as deaths outside hospitals and ones that were not preceded by coronavirus tests — including some in early February in California — are added to the total.