New global coronavirus death forecasts are chilling and controversial

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New estimates released this week suggest that the global effects of coronaviruses will reach an even greater level of fear before the end of 2020. By the end of the year, the total death toll exceeded 2.8 million.

But other disease experts are very skeptical of that prediction, which comes from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Measurements and Evaluation or IHME. NPR spoke with the head of the IHME team,
Chris Murray, And two researchers not involved in the work of IHME:
Ashish Jar Brown University
Calypso Harkidu Below are five points from these interviews at the Imperial College of Public Health School in London.

1. The United States may continue to rank in the countries that have been hit hardest.

By the end of the year, the U.S. had more than 410,000 deaths by the end of the year, second only to nearly 660,000 deaths in India and far more than Brazil’s 174,000 deaths, according to IHME. I will. Similarly, the United States is predicted to rank eighth when dying as a percentage of the population. (The top five in the group are the US Virgin Islands, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Peru.) Murray is an American in July. “We shouldn’t celebrate, but plan what happens in the fall,” he says. “By December, there could be up to 30,000 deaths per day at the global level, so it is very important for the government to predict this.”

2. The cold weather in the northern region will greatly facilitate the future surge.

Murray says relaxed vigilance is not the only factor in the fall’s turnaround. The main factor is the coldness of the northern hemisphere. He says the team have so far compared coronavirus infection rates in countries in the southern hemisphere, where June-August coincides with winter, and countries in the northern hemisphere, where those months bring summer weather. “Looking at the huge epidemic that has spread in Argentina, despite considerable efforts to block it, a major epidemic in Chile, an epidemic in southern Brazil and South Africa,” he says, and Things actually improved on average in places with hemispheres similar to what was happening in the north, where there was a similar delegation of social distances—statistical analysis showed a very strong correlation with seasonality. It is possible. ”

This analysis does not mention why cold weather correlates with more epidemics. For example, people may spend more time indoors, or viruses may survive better in cold air or some combination of these descriptions. For any reason, the Northern Hemisphere is populated by far more people in the world, so when cold weather arrives, the overall daily global number of infections increases dramatically, Murray says.

3. These predictions may be significantly off.

Ashish Jha, Dean of the Department of Public Health at Brown University, says IHME’s forecast feels very unconvincing, especially for the projected 410,000 deaths in the United States by 1 January. .. “I think it’s completely unrealistic,” Jha says.

One of his criticisms is that the IHME team assumes that those who are infected with the coronavirus in the coming months will die at the same rate as those who were infected early in the pandemic. This is based on the team’s findings that mortality did not improve, even after various treatments and treatment advances, Murray said.

Jar does not agree. “We’ve gotten a lot better by caring for sick patients, I think I’ve probably reduced mortality by about 50%,” Jha says. “Forgetting everything we’ve learned in the last six months, and the idea that no new treatment will make a difference — looking at this, no public health person who thinks it can trust it. Quote.”

4. It is not even clear how many people have already died of COVID-19.

A related issue is that many countries do not have reliable health statistics. This is especially true in low-income countries, says Kalipso Chalkidou of Imperial College.

“I don’t really know why people die in most countries around the world,” says Kharkid. And she further means that the deaths of the vast number of COVID-19s are likely to be uncountable.

As a result, the estimates of global coronavirus mortality to date are already quite different. For example, IHME estimates that around 910,000 people die worldwide. That’s about 44,000 more than estimated by other prominent teams led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. According to Murray, the difference lies in the adjustments made by the IHME team to compensate for what appears to be a significantly understated COVID-19 mortality in the two countries where the outbreaks are particularly serious, Ecuador and Peru. I say yes.

“There are also no relevant data on comorbidities,” Karkidou said. [that increase people’s chances of dying of COVID-19] — Number of people suffering from chronic conditions such as diabetes in Africa. “This further complicates efforts to accurately predict the path of pandemics in the region.

Five.
Making the right predictions can have political implications.

Jha states that his disagreement over IHME methodologies is far more than technical debate. “The question here is whether there will be 250,000 or 300,000 deaths. [by year’s end in the United States] —Still terrible—Political leaders can perform the victorious dance and can say: And because of all the great things we did, only 300,000 Americans died,” Jha says.

“It only sets a standard that is very easy to overcome, which makes us somehow blind to the actual horrifying results that the United States has ever brought.”

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