U.S. surpasses 150,000 total COVID-19 deaths

Fast-rising number shows difficulty in forecasting spread of COVID-19

The United States’ leading authority on infectious disease expressed hope in April that no more than 60,000 people in the country would die from the coronavirus. A revered research center predicted a few weeks later that the figure would be just over 70,000 people by early August. When the number of deaths shot up in May, President Donald Trump said that anywhere between 75,000 and 100,000 people could die.

On Wednesday, the nation’s death toll surpassed 150,000.

That the figure, based on a New York Times database, has soared so soon and so far beyond those estimates illustrates how difficult it can be to accurately forecast the

spread of the virus, or the way citizens and politicians will respond to it.

“The aspect which is really impossible to predict is human behavior,” said Virginia Pitzer, a professor of epidemiology at Yale. “To what extent are people going to socially distance themselves? To what extent are politics going to influence whether you wear a mask? All of these factors are impossible to factor in.”

Americans have rarely been as hungry for scientific predictions as they have been this year. Charts of virus case counts fill social media feeds; epidemiologists

are all over television; Dr. Anthony Fauci has become a household name.

But the statistical modelers who were trying to predict the spread of a new virus began with very little solid data, experts said, so it was no surprise that they have had to repeatedly revise their projections. The revisions have generally been in one direction: up.

As of Wednesday evening, at least 150,909 people were known to have died of the virus in the United States, out of more than 4.4 million reported infections. And even these figures are likely to be undercounts, experts say.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in some regions the number of people

who have been infected could be two to 13 times higher than the tallies of reported cases. Experts have said the official death toll probably omits many people whose deaths were virus-related, especially early in the pandemic. And more people will die each day as long as the virus continues to spread.

Weekly averages of reported deaths in the United States had fallen substantially since an early peak in mid-April, when the national death toll was driven largely by a catastrophic surge in New York state. But deaths began to climb again this month, and the nation is now reporting about 1,000 deaths a day.

The current toll is being felt much more widely

across many states, especially in the South, while New York is down to reporting an average of 16 deaths a day. Nearly 2,200 deaths have been reported in the past week in Texas, the state with the highest recent death toll relative to its population, followed by Arizona and South Carolina. Florida broke its daily record again Wednesday, reporting 216 fatalities and bringing the state’s overall total to 6,332.

“The mortality is going to march in lockstep with our transmission,” said Dr. Sarah Fortune, chair of immunology and infectious diseases at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard.

Exactly what percentage of people who get the virus die from it is not yet clear.

The World Health Organization’s chief scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, said last month that it was likely to be about 0.6%. If that rate proves accurate, it would mean a vast majority of infections in the United States have gone unreported.

Fortune estimated that a mortality rate of 0.5% of all coronavirus cases would be a “best-case scenario” but that the death rate could range up to 2% of cases, depending on how much the virus reaches into the highest-risk environments, like nursing homes.

“We have to do better in terms of limiting transmission,” Fortune said. “We have this terrible death toll because we have done a lousy job at limiting transmission.”

By May 1, several states were reopening gyms, salons, restaurants and other businesses. Trump, who has given a wide range of predictions for the ultimate death count, said May 3 that the virus might end up killing 100,000 people, after saying for much of April that the virus would not kill more than 75,000.

The next day, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, whose model is closely watched by the White House, increased its own projection, warning that there would likely be about 135,000 deaths by early August. The institute’s model, which includes a wide range of possible scenarios, now projects about 220,000 deaths by November.