New York deaths are now down to a relative trickle. I am going to try to estimate the number of lives saved by Cuomo and the citizens of the state of New York. Back of an envelope method. Improvements might easily be made.
This may be sweating the numbers too much, but let's say the antibody samples in New York state are correct and that the 24,000 deaths are the mortality effect of covid-19 on 20% of the population (4m, say).
That gives a rough overall mortality rate from the virus of 0.6%.
Let's then assume Remdesivir can reduce that 0.6% to 0.5%. And that the effects of testing and tracing are negligible, and masks are not mandated, because the federal government is incompetent.
Let's also assume epidemiologists are correct that once the virus hits 60% of the population, it can no longer spread very efficiently.
Then I can figure a rough number of people whose lives will have been saved in NY by being cautious as a state.
That is, 40,000 lives, give or take (and assuming the current trickle is relatively immaterial, numberswise).
That's an achievement.
The other way of putting it. These are the numbers now exposed just in NY state as a result of undoing isolation measures too early (ie now). Without boundaries people cannot cross, people from states that remove the lockdown can travel to NY. So all of NY's own sacrifices will prove pointless.
But 40,000 is actually an undercount from a harm perspective, because a wave of patients over a short period would overwhelm the health service in the state of New York, multiplying the mortality rate to some unknown level.
In the rest of the US, I think antibody samples haven't been taken, but extrapolating from the number of deaths, it appears the exposure rate is much lower (7m or so people in total out of a population of 330m, so between 2 and 3%). Extrapolating infection to the remaining US population, as looks likely now that the Bananarepublicans are determined to break the lockdown, puts perhaps a million lives at grave risk, of which only 43k or so have been lost.
I hope Fauci appears before the House committee to explain the actual numbers the government is using and the risks involved. That is, setting aside Dr Birx's model which is obviously optimistic junk [compare the plateau shape of the actual curve versus the neat mathematical curve with a simple peak in the model she is using).
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