FLASHBACK: Ten Days Ago, White House Economic Team Projected Pandemic Deaths Would Fall to Zero by Today

Reed RichardsonMay 15th, 2020, 4:52 pm
 

White House Econmic Team Projection Showing Zero Covid Deaths by May 15

Ten days ago, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors released what seemed like a patently ridiculous prediction: that the country’s Covid-19 death toll would drop to zero by May 15.

Today, that asburd, completely baseless estimate was confirmed — as more than 1,000 more Americans have succumbed to complications from the virus as of Friday afternoon, raising the overall fatality number to nearly 87,000.

When the CEA published its projection on May 5, it somewhat ironically coincided with an upward projection by the IMHE, which nearly doubled its estimate of Covid-19 deaths by early August to 134,475. Economists and statisticians quickly seized on the White House’s use of a standardized “cubic fit” function in Microsoft Excel as the culprit for the reality-defying prediction and noted that using this blunt tool for epidemiological data not only defied rigorous statistical modeling but good old-fashioned common sense, as the nation was still seeing record-high daily death tolls at that point.

The source of the White House’s rosy scenario was traced back to Senior Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett, who also co-authored the 1999 book Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, which was infamously published just months before the dot-com crash of 2000. Hassett, the Washington Post reported, had been circulating the chart around the White House and was likely the reason it was ultimately released to the public.

The number of deaths estimated by the IHME model by June 1 is still much lower than those in the draft government report. But the IHME model is considered among the more optimistic projections. Even more optimistic than that, however, is the “cubic model” prepared by Trump adviser and economist Kevin Hassett. People with knowledge of that model say it shows deaths dropping precipitously in May — and essentially going to zero by May 15.

As the nation grimly neared the 90,000-death milestone in the coronavirus crisis, the White House was called out for yet another example of falsely dismissing the scale of the disaster.

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