POLITICO NIGHTLY: Driving blindly toward the exit

By Renuka Rayasam

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MODELING SCHOOL — President Donald Trump told the country's governors tonight, as part of his three-phase plan for reopening the economy, that they need to take the wheel. But state leaders are driving blind when it comes to figuring out what's ahead. A lack of testing or clear treatment for Covid-19 are not the only problems facing policymakers. They also don't have reliable models to base their decisions on. The models have gotten better over time. But they've also become more controversial. Conservatives have jumped on the changing projections of the pandemic's toll to say the disease has been overhyped — and that alarmist public health officials were misled into killing the economy instead. Yet Covid models get an important truth — If more people go about their daily lives, more people will die. The current models are blunt instruments, but they led to lockdowns that saved lives, say the cadre of modelers who work with governments to build these prediction machines. "Models of the sort we are trying to build for coronavirus are self-defeating," said Nina Fefferman, a professor of math and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who models diseases in people and animals. As social distancing does its work and medical care proves to be effective, death toll predictions will get lower. That's not an error, Fefferman said. It's the point. Still the models have been flawed, the modelers concede, for two main reasons. First, because of limited testing they are relying on incomplete data, especially of the true disease spread. And second, they rely on a set of assumptions that are impossible to get perfectly right. Two models have gotten the most attention — Researchers at the Imperial College of London published a paper on March 16 showing that without social distancing the worst case scenario would be 510,000 deaths in the United Kingdom and 2.2 million deaths in the United States. That's the model that spurred a wave of lockdowns across both countries. The group's lead researcher, Neil Ferguson, has defended the model's most recent projection of 20,000 U.K. deaths as evidence that social distancing measures have worked. The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation model uses statistical data gathered from the real world to calculate how quickly people will die from Covid. The model's critics say it is relying on data that doesn't apply in the U.S. Here, the disease is likely more contagious than it was in China, where even some mildly sick patients were taken to isolation wards. The University of Washington modelers also assume that all U.S. states will impose and maintain stay at home measures through May 2020, which hasn't happened. Those assumptions led forecasters to downgrade the death toll through August from 240,000 to 60,000, a number that has been criticized by many modelers for being far too optimistic. Already, 30,000 have died. Building a better model — States and researchers are now racing to finetune their models so that they can better predict when to lift lockdowns. Louisiana, for example, developed a model , released today, that shows projected deaths under four social-distancing scenarios — and all four show Covid-19 lingering until at least the end of the year. Narrower models are also likely to be better guides than large-scale ones. Health reporter Tucker Doherty tells us that the University of Washington model could release forecasts as early as Friday of dates that states could consider reopening if they have other mitigation measures in place. Even modelers say that policymakers should look to the real world to make decisions. Neither model captures the heightened, potentially catastrophic threat of a single positive case in a nursing home. "Not all models can address all questions," said Natalie Dean, a biostatistics professor at the University of Florida. "People on the front lines also need to have a voice." The models will never be perfect. Trump acknowledged as much tonight, as the country's crash course on modeling continues to sink in. "We believe we will experience far fewer deaths than even the optimistic projection," he said. "But there is no such thing as an optimistic projection on death." Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition, a nightly intelligence brief from our global newsroom on the effect of the coronavirus on politics and policy, the economy and global health. I feel sorry for this poor guy who won tickets to the Stanley Cup finals on "The Price is Right." Reach out with tips: rrayasam@politico.com and @renurayasam.

A message from PhRMA: In these unprecedented times, America's biopharmaceutical companies are coming together to achieve one shared goal: beating COVID-19. We are expanding our unique manufacturing capabilities and sharing available capacity to ramp up production once a successful medicine or vaccine is developed. Explore our efforts.

First In Nightly

FROM THE STUDIO AUDIENCE — "The entire country is sitting at home looking for expert guidance. On some days we get it," chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza writes of Trump's coronavirus press briefings. Unlike the most of the country, Ryan has attended the briefings in person. From temperature checks upon entering to a failure to socially distance by some reporters, Ryan describes the scene at a show that provides "daily access to the president and his top aides that's enormously revealing."

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Customers lined up outside a Maryland Costco store. | Getty Images

Around the Nation

DOUBLE BOGEY — Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker today announced a partnership of seven states that are supposed to work together to reopen the Midwest's economy, Illinois Playbook author Shia Kapos writes. There was just one small problem: Two of Illinois' neighbors, Iowa and Missouri, were missing. It's not clear how Pritzker could achieve his goals without an alliance along his western border. The St. Louis metropolitan area straddles Missouri and Illinois, and Iowa and Illinois split the Quad Cities. "We would love to have as many states as want to join," Pritzker said at his daily news briefing in Chicago. Pritzker, a Democrat, has been frustrated that Iowa has failed to issue a stay-at-home order and that Missouri only recently did. Both states are governed by Republicans. But Pritzker's group is already bipartisan: It includes the Republican governors of Indiana and Ohio. The group is broad-minded in another sense, too: It includes the decidedly non-Midwestern state of Kentucky, whose governor is a Democrat. (The other Democratic governors in the partnership lead Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.) Pritzker has said he is concerned that Illinoisans are crossing the border to play hooky in Iowa and then returning to Illinois, possibly infected with the virus. He has reason to worry: Iowa golf courses have seen an uptick of Illinois residents. Extra time — More than a dozen states have extended stay-at-home orders past the White House target date of April 30 for reopening the economy. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced today his state would extend its order to May 15 and sent 100 ventilators to neighboring New Jersey. Making of a crisis — In the latest episode of POLITICO Dispatch, Pulse co-host Dan Diamond traces the coronavirus crisis back through three presidents — and explains what we can learn from past failures.

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Ask The Audience

Our question for our readers this week — How will you measure when this pandemic is over? What is your personal yardstick for a return to normalcy? Use the form to send us your responses, and we will feature several in Friday's edition.

Nightly Number

1.7 million — The number of Facebook shares of fake coronavirus social media posts — everything from advice about bogus medical remedies for Covid-19 to claims that minority groups were less susceptible to infection. The social networking giant said today that millions of Facebook users will soon be told if they saw online posts containing misinformation as part of its latest plans to contain the spread of rumors, half truths and lies connected to the public health crisis. (h/t Mark Scott) Who got what — Economic relief for individuals in the CARES Act comes in the form of $1,200 checks for most individuals, or $2,400 for married couples, and $500 per child. Tucker Doherty looks at which industries make up the 83 percent of American workers eligible for the payments, and what percentage of people in various professions will receive full or partial relief.

The Global Fight

ZOOM DIPLOMACY — Instead of sipping cocktails and doing what they do best — personal contact — the world's diplomats have become caged animals in an endless loop of video conferences . The toll is showing: "It took three weeks to get a (U.N.) Security Council meeting on coronavirus. If it hadn't been online it could have happened much, much earlier," Estonian Ambassador Sven Jürgenson told Ryan Heath . From Angela Merkel down, the consensus is that WhatsApp doesn't compete with eye-to-eye efforts at compromise. "Operating online is not real diplomacy," said Ashok Mirpuri, Singapore's veteran ambassador in Washington. All the nuance is lost. Digital tools help Martin Weiss, Austria's ambassador, find far-flung Austrians stuck on cruise ships, but the benefits stop when the discussions get complex. "There isn't the same pressure to compromise you would experience if you were in the same room. It's easier to hide behind your own screen," Weiss said.

JOIN TOMORROW - COVID-19: A WAKE-UP CALL FOR SUSTAINABILITY: Join Global Translations author Ryan Heath tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. for a virtual conversation with Paul Polman, chairman, International Chamber of Commerce, co-founder of Imagine and former CEO of Unilever. With a direct line to hundreds of CEOs Polman discusses how the coronavirus pandemic is a "wake-up call" for global businesses and why sustainability is now essential in every organization. Have a question for Paul? Tweet it to @POLITICOLive using #AskPOLITICO. REGISTER HERE TO PARTICIPATE.

Parting Words

CHINA'S LONG GAME — In deciding to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, Trump called the group "very China-centric." He might be right, writes Kristine Lee of the Asia-Pacific Program at the Center for a New American Security — and that's the problem, she argues. "Trump's decision to defund WHO isn't just petty or reactive — it literally plays into China's hands," she writes. "If the U.S. downgrades its participation in the WHO and other U.N. organizations, it will cede even more ground, and influence, to the Chinese — which is what they want." As the U.S. has walked away from international organizations, China has installed nationals at the top of multiple U.N. agencies. "Beijing's leverage over the WHO cannot be understood independently of a much longer and broader campaign, one that aims to bend the arc of global governance toward a more illiberal orientation that privileges the interests of authoritarian actors," Lee writes.   A message from PhRMA: In these unprecedented times, America's biopharmaceutical companies are coming together to achieve one shared goal: beating COVID-19. The investments we've made have prepared us to act swiftly: · Rapidly screening our vast global libraries to identify potential treatments and have 284 clinical trials underway · Dedicating our top scientists and using our investments in new technologies to speed the development of safe and effective vaccines · Sharing learnings from clinical trials in real time with governments and other companies to advance the development of additional therapies · Expanding our unique manufacturing capabilities and sharing available capacity to ramp up production once a successful medicine or vaccine is developed Explore our efforts.   Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   Follow us POLITICO, LLC 1000 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA, 22209, USA