This Will Get Worse
The grim math of a coronavirus future
By Josh Barro
March 10 was just a few days ago, but it already feels very far away — before the NBA season was suspended, Tom Hanks tested positive, and a national state of emergency was declared. On that date, Think Global Health, which is a project of the Council on Foreign Relations, produced a report that includes a data table that tells us how many people in the U.S. might ultimately die from COVID-19 under a variety of different assumptions. In the top-left corner, the table shows a scenario where 0.1 percent of people in the U.S. contract the virus and 0.1 percent of those die from it, leading to a bit more than 300 deaths. That’s the best corner of the table. We like that corner. What we don’t like is the bottom-right corner of the table, which contemplates 50 percent of the American population contracting the virus and one percent of those dying. If we end up in that corner, about 1.6 million of us will die.
We could land anywhere in the table. Beyond that, unfortunately, I can’t offer much more specific guidance — in fact, depending on which experts you ask, we could land outside the table, too. But our knowledge about our lack of a knowledge is a kind of knowledge. The coronavirus endgame depends on a series of unknowns. We keep getting more data, but we still don’t know how inherently…
