Comparing COVID-19 and H1N1
In his March 26 letter Raymond Gross argued that Vice-president is a poor choice as a nominee for President by the Democrats. Mr. Gross pointed to Biden’s role in the Obama administration’s handling of the new H1N1 virus a decade ago as an example of this, presenting accurate statistics from the CDC: 60.8 million cases, 274, 000 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths over a 12-month period from April 2009 to April 2010. Not a pretty picture, no argument from me.
But is that H1N1 response worse than the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19? If the metric of that, as Gross implied, is simply the number of deaths, then let’s compare. For COVID-19, I’ll use statistics from the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) obtained at ‘https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections’.
IHME forecasts ranges for 3 metrics: total hospitalizations, deaths per day, and total deaths. They use projections from models based on certain assumptions about how much testing will be done and how much social isolation is practiced to make these projections, run the models thousands of times (each outcome is independent and different) and report the median values with the minimum and maximum values — shown below as ‘median (min; max):
Total hospitalizations on the projected national peak on April 14: 232,000 (116,000; 466,000) – that’s just on April 14.
Deaths on April 14: 2,340 (1126; 4827) — 17% of the total H1N1 deaths over a 12-month period — on April 14th alone. COVID-19 deaths are projected to equal total H1N1 deaths (12,500) on April 7, one week from now.
Total number of deaths from COVID-19 period: 81,000 (38,000; 162,000). Even the low end of that range is more than 3 times higher than the total deaths from H1N1 in slightly over half the time.
The model assumptions I mentioned above have been modified to reflect current reality so the forecasts have changed. The best-case scenario is now 100,000-200,000 deaths which assumes a national shut-down not yet in place. Without one right away we may see 1-2 million deaths.
Part of the problem is the tepid federal response which, instead of establishing a coordinated national response in testing and PPE production, has states competing not only with each other but with FEMA! I do not know in what world this makes sense — but it is not this one. Imagine a WWII scenario in which FDR took the same approach after Pearl Harbor. I doubt the US would have survived.
Had the Trump administration begun coordinated production of PPE and testing in January when first advised of the seriousness of this outbreak our best-case scenario now could well have been the worst-case.
If I were Mr. Gross, I think I’d steer clear of the H1N1 argument. All Presidents get dealt crises. They differ in how they respond. Even now it is clear that President Trump’s ham-fisted handling of this crisis will result in thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of needless deaths.
Paul Mack
Columbus
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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