Going viral

After the death of 700 Americans in one day, more than 3,400 of us, including more than 1,500 New Yorkers, have now died from coronavirus, serious milestones on a steep road. Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House COVID-19 coordinator, says projections show up to 200,000 deaths nationwide “if we do things almost perfectly.”

The small bit of good news, revealed Tuesday night by Birx, is that social distancing implemented in the rest of the country is holding down the growth of the virus. The bad news is that the cat is largely out of the bag in dense New York and New Jersey, where cases and deaths keep rising sharply.

The United States now leads the world in total cases, eclipsing China. That’s not in and of itself alarming. Given Beijing’s penchant for lying, its totals are not to be trusted. More to the point, case totals depend entirely on who gets tested, and standards vary wildly.

For the same reason, death rates are also inconsistent and unreliable. New York’s now registers at 2% (that’s 1,550 divided by 75,795), which is lower than Italy’s but orders of magnitude worse than the seasonal flu’s 0.1%.

This is absolutely not just another flu. Radical social distancing, though doing what it’s supposed to do so far, cannot last forever. The economic damage would be too grave, as would the public health damage of the second Great Depression it would surely cause.

But it must last long enough to prevent the worst-case scenario from becoming reality. Steel yourselves.