With help from Myah Ward
ADD IT UP — As the country approached 200,000 Covid deaths this weekend, one death from cancer overshadowed them all. The pandemic already seemed to be receding into the background of the 2020 presidential election when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, setting off speculation about her successor, the stakes for health care and other policies, and what it all means for the case of Biden v. Trump.
But the pandemic is still here. The country will record that 200,000th Covid death today, according to the Johns Hopkins tracker. That toll is about one-fifth of a global tally that’s quickly approaching 1 million.
It’s also above initial projections from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a model that was influential in the White House early in the pandemic. The group released its first Covid death projections on March 26, predicting that Covid would claim between 38,000 and 162,000 American lives, likely around 81,000.
Less than two weeks later, IHME lowered its high-end projection to 136,000 deaths, as states instituted stay-at-home orders and people stopped traveling, eating out, getting haircuts, and going to shopping malls or movie theaters. “Everyone in the modeling business, myself included, felt then that the worst was behind us,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at IHME.
It wasn’t. The country blew past estimate after estimate. The term “grim milestone” in headlines became so routine that we banned it at the Nightly. The country recorded 50,000 deaths on April 24, 100,000 deaths on May 29 and 150,000 deaths on Aug. 1, according to Johns Hopkins.
Mokdad defended the IHME model, saying the group based its initial projections on data in China, South Korea, Italy and Spain — countries where people followed aggressive lockdown rules, governments instituted mask mandates and there was support for isolation measures. By contrast the U.S. never fully locked down.
Then, under political pressure from the president and fears of continued economic devastation, most states lifted those partial lockdowns — many governors did not mandate masks, nor order Covid patients to quarantine away from their families, much less keep bars closed — well before the virus was contained and measures to test and trace new cases were implemented.
“When you look at Chinese, they did what they were told to do,” said Mokdad, a former CDC officer. “Here the CDC wasn’t doing what we know we should do.”
Early in the pandemic another number got a lot of attention: 2.2 million, the number of U.S. deaths predicted by a group at the Imperial College London if the virus ran rampant through the country. President Donald Trump touted his pandemic response last week by saying the country is well below that projection.
“If the not-so-good job was done, you’d be between 1.5 million — I remember these numbers so well — and 2.2 million,” he said. “That’s quite a difference.”
It’s a talking point that we’ll see a lot, especially as Election Day nears even though conservatives maligned the initial study. The Imperial College study accounted for an unrealistic scenario, that people would do nothing in the face of mounting deaths and that Covid treatments wouldn’t improve. But the alarming numbers forced the U.K. to abandon a herd immunity strategy and spurred U.S. lockdowns.
Still the job isn’t done. Just because other issues have eclipsed Covid, doesn’t mean that the virus is in the past.
IHME did get one prediction right: that daily deaths would peak on April 16, when 2,309 Americans died from the virus, according to its estimates.
Since then, Covid case fatality rates have fallen, but the daily Covid death toll in the United States has never dropped below 550. An average of nearly 1,000 people have been dying a day this month, according to Johns Hopkins.
IHME, which is now on its third version of its model, shows that virus deaths will start to grow again around Election Day if restrictions continue to ease and people don’t wear masks. Deaths are projected to hit 300,000 on Dec. 9 if the current trajectory continues. Cases could spike when winter hits and people move indoors, blowing past previous daily death tolls. The group is predicting the country will hit 378,000 deaths by the end of 2020 if current trends continue. And we’ll equal or surpass the April 16 peak for daily deaths in December, if we stay on this trajectory.
About 7 million Americans are known to have been infected so far, which is probably an undercount by a factor of 5 to 10, said Joshua Weitz, a professor of quantitative biosciences at Georgia Tech. “That is closer to zero than it is the end of an epidemic.”
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. OK, I got the message. Time to start watching Schitt’s Creek. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
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Five-year-old Abby Martin of Arlington, Va., pays respect with her mother Jackie Martin as they visit a makeshift memorial in front of the U.S. Supreme Court for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. | Getty Images
| FIRST IN NIGHTLY |
NOT FED UP YET — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was once on the verge of being fired by President Trump for not doing enough to turbocharge the U.S. economy. Now, he stands a decent chance of keeping his job no matter who is elected president, financial services reporter Victoria Guida writes. Powell’s extraordinary pledge to spend trillions of dollars to support the economy and keep borrowing rates at historic lows during the pandemic has helped the stock market roar back near pre-Covid levels — Trump’s favorite barometer of his performance. Removing the Fed chair would rattle world markets.
Maintaining stability would be a major consideration for Democrat Joe Biden, too. And under Powell’s leadership, the central bank has unveiled a sweeping new policy promoting “broad-based and inclusive” job gains, a major acknowledgment that the central bank should help disadvantaged Americans — in line with a call by Biden’s campaign for the Fed to directly tackle racial inequality.
Powell has also cultivated allies on both sides of the aisle, meeting roughly 250 times with lawmakers from when he took the helm of the central bank in February 2018 through July, according to his personal calendars. He has garnered bipartisan praise for his actions during the pandemic — including from Trump, who has called him the “most improved player” in government, a remarkable turnabout from a president who publicly abused him for more than a year for not cutting interest rates.
| FROM THE HEALTH DESK |
HHS SHAKEUP … AGAIN — The Trump administration today removed the top two liaisons between the White House and the health department, leaving HHS Secretary Alex Azar’s chief of staff as the de facto personnel chief, according to three people with knowledge of the situation. White House Liaison Emily Newman and her deputy Catherine Granito will be shifting full-time to the Voice of America’s parent organization, the United States Agency for Global Media, HHS chief of staff Brian Harrison told senior staff today.
Newman already has spent more than three months detailed to the global media agency as its chief of staff, which meant that Granito — an undergraduate at the University of Michigan as recently as this spring — had been in charge of the health department’s personnel while playing a role in shaping policies in the middle of a pandemic, health care reporter Dan Diamond writes.
The decision to reassign Newman and Granito was jointly made by the White House and the health department, said two individuals familiar with the situation. The White House liaison’s office at HHS traditionally serves as a go-between for personnel decisions, although Azar’s team has received little forewarning on many recent personnel moves, the individuals said.
AS THE ADVISORIES TURN — The CDC reversed its stance on whether the coronavirus is airborne, days after it warned that the virus spreads most commonly through the air and is more contagious than the agency had previously suggested, health care reporter Brianna Ehley writes. Language explaining that the virus is airborne, published Friday, was a “draft version” posted to the agency’s website in error, according to a note published this morning. “CDC is currently updating its recommendations regarding airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” the note says, adding that a version of the Friday language will be posted once the process is complete.
“This was an error on the part of our agency and I apologize on behalf of the CDC,” said John Brooks, chief medical officer for the CDC’s Covid-19 Emergency Response, during a call today with providers and state and local health officials. “We weren’t ready to put it up.”
The agency’s website now emphasizes the risk of close person-to-person contact, as it did before the change Friday. That is “the main mode” of transmission, Brooks said.
The CDC’s unusual reversal comes as the country prepares for flu season and cooler fall and winter weather that will likely drive many people to spend more time indoors — increasing their risk of exposure to the virus.
| ASK THE AUDIENCE |
Nightly asks you: As cooler weather arrives in much of the U.S., the Nightly crew has noticed that fall and winter holidays seem to be getting an early pandemic observance. Have you or your neighbors set up some early decorations for Halloween or Thanksgiving (maybe even Christmas)? Send us your photos at nightly@politico.com, and we’ll include select shots in our Friday edition.
| COVID-2020 |
BIG SWINGS — Just a handful of states could decide who becomes the next president. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, reporters from across the country, including Tim Alberta, Elena Schneider, Holly Otterbein and Michael Kruse, break down what it will take for Trump and Biden to win over the most critical voters.
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| NIGHTLY NUMBER |
31 percent The proportion of likely Maine voters who say they would take a vaccine right away, according to a new Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll. Fifty percent of voters would wait a while until others took it, and 16 percent said they would not take the vaccine. |
| THE GLOBAL FIGHT |
BRITONS ON ALERT — The U.K.’s coronavirus alert level is set to be raised from 3 to 4, the first change since June, Andrew McDonald writes. Level 4 is the second-highest level, meaning that transmission of the virus is “high or rising exponentially.” Level 3 means the virus is in “general circulation.” Level 5, the highest level, would mean there was “material risk of health care services being overwhelmed.”
The step was taken by the chief medical officers of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In a joint statement they said: “After a period of lower Covid cases and deaths, the number of cases are now rising rapidly and probably exponentially in significant parts of all four nations.”
Brits are waiting for expected new lockdown restrictions, due to be announced separately for the different nations in the coming days. At a press conference this morning, top English health officials Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty warned the U.K. could see up to 50,000 new cases a day by mid-October. Vallance said data suggests that about 6,000 people per day are now getting the infection.
| PARTING WORDS |
STILL NOTORIOUS — In the latest episode of Check In 2020, Eugene Daniels talks to chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza about how the fight for the next SCOTUS justice will affect the presidential map and the battle for the Senate.
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