by Drew Hesp
On March 9th, 2020, President Donald Trump tweeted, “[The Flu] averages between 27,000 and 70,000 [deaths] per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” From a purely utilitarian standpoint, it may appear that the president made a logical point: why risk the severe consequences of a total economic shutdown in response to a virus which affects a mere five-hundred Americans? After all—following this logic—the nation does not institute a lockdown in response to the seasonal Flu, which, at the time of President Trump’s tweet, had been responsible for many more deaths this year than COVID-19. However, as many with a background in statistics would be apt to point out, while the numbers in President Trump’s Tweet may have been accurate, they were incredibly misleading.
To understand why comparing the total death tolls of the two viruses at the time of his Tweet was such an irresponsible move, one must consider one major factor which was conveniently omitted from Trump’s Tweet: the growth rate of the coronavirus. A high mortality rate of COVID-19 is not exactly what makes it such a dangerous disease; in fact, the virus’ mortality rate is now estimated to be around 2% in the United States, and is likely even lower than that after accounting for the large quantity of asymptomatic and mild cases which have not been tested (although it is still significantly higher than the mortality rate of the Flu). As such, when the president boasted about the low number of only 22 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States, it may have initially seemed like the disease was being well-contained by the federal government. However, the relatively low mortality rate of COVID-19 is, paradoxically, part of what makes it so dangerous.
With diseases such as Ebola, a high mortality rate of around 50% makes it much more lethal for any individual who contracts it. However, on a broader scale, an extremely high mortality rate can actually make it more difficult for a virus to spread, as it tends to kill its hosts too quickly before it is able to be spread through pathogens. With a less lethal virus like the coronavirus, transmission is made significantly more possible due to its lower mortality rate. In fact, a disease such as COVID-19 can be most effectively modeled using a logistic regression, also commonly known as a “Sigmoid curve”. A Sigmoid curve can be effectively split down the middle into two regions, with the midpoint of the curve being known as the “inflection point” of the graph. Up until reaching the graph’s inflection point, the number of cases grows exponentially. To put this into perspective, some logistic growth models from late February showed that the number of COVID-19 cases was doubling at a rate as fast as every four days. So while the March 9th count of 522 cases seemed low, these numbers more than doubled by March 13th. By March 12th, the NBA season was suspended indefinitely after Utah Jazz star Rudy Gobert contracted the virus, and within days, other professional sports leagues such as the XFL and NHL were next to follow suit. The shift in the public perception surrounding the virus was rapid, from Trump downplaying the virus as a threat which was—as the president claimed—comparable to the Flu on March 9th, to all of a sudden various companies announcing indefinite closures by March 15th. Such a shift should come as no surprise after examining the projected growth models of the virus: that’s how exponential growth works. The number of cases starts out really small, until, all of a sudden, it's not.
Ultimately, the response from the federal government to the incoming threat of coronavirus was not just naive, it was downright negligent and ignorant of scientific facts. The Trump Administration was briefed several times on the severity of the virus as early as January, but minimal action was taken to protect the American public. Even worse, Trump chose to downplay the virus, instilling within many American citizens a ‘no-fear’ attitude in regards to COVID-19. Sure, the president issued travel restrictions against China by January 31st, but it took until nearly a full month later, on February 29th, for the president to finally take further action against the virus, this time banning travel from Iran. With a pandemic which undergoes exponential growth, it's impossible to maintain a successful response by relying on reactionary measures. The only way to prevent the dangerous, unchecked growth of a disease such as COVID-19 is by being proactive, and for the entire month of February, the federal government failed to do so and ignored the warnings of statisticians and scientists, thus allowing for the United States to surpass China as the number one nation in the world in COVID-19 cases.
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