Covid-19 and the crying of wolf

There is, or at least was, a school of thought in some circles that we — meaning virtually the entire global leadership — are overreacting to the novel coronavirus. We should all hope that this is so, and if the infection rate and death toll remains low we can anticipate a robust debate online shouting match between the Covid-19 “deniers” — to borrow a handy bit of opprobrium from the climate debate — and the believers in “science,” to misappropriate another. The deniers will say that our policy response was wasteful in the first place, and the, er, sciencists will counter that the policy response led to the successful outcome and that the heavy interventions saved lives.

That’s one pointless online food fight we sorely hope comes to pass.

In any case, the skeptic/denier predictions are not holding up in these still early days. Just two days ago, we saw this prediction from a conservative whose work we otherwise admire (the author is a friend of mine, so please be gentle):

Here’s what I think you’ll find if you track things for the next week. The number of cases will go up by 500-1000 cases per day for the next couple of days. Then the increase will start to decline. The number of deaths will also go up, but modestly. I suspect that by the end of this coming week the total number of cases will be around 6000, the total number of deaths 100-150. For context, so far this year, the total number of deaths from the common or non-Wuhan flu is about 14,000. (Bold emphasis added.)

At late afternoon today, far from the end of the week and only 2-3 days in to the forecast period, American cases were at 6137 6211, and we had already added discovered 1474 1548 cases today alone. Our guess — go ahead and consider it a stake in the ground — is that we will discover at least 2000 cases a day for the remaining four days in the week, and that we will have between 17,000 and 22,000 cases in the United States by the end of the day Saturday.

Most such skeptic/denier assertions — that the overreaction is the result of “media hype” rather than a genuine threat — lack my friend’s courage to make a numerical prediction, other than to compare the current Covid-19 casualties to those of seasonal flu. See examples here, here, here, and here. And, of course, President Trump at least postured a denialist stance until the last week or so.

We have been predicting a massive problem, far exceeding the seasonal flu, since the end of February, but we absolute understand skepticism. We — meaning all of us — have been warned about something like this for 25 years or more, sometimes in strident terms, without the scary predictions coming to pass. Most people can only take so much crying wolf.

Just remember how that fable ends.