Here's the recent timeline of fatalities:
50k 4/24/20
60k 4/29
70k 5/5
80k 5/11
90k 5/18
We've gone from adding 10k dead every 5 days to every 6 days and to now 7 days.
Safe to say we'll be at 100k dead in about a week, approximately May 25 or shortly thereafter.
If you subtract recoveries and fatalities from total cases, there remain roughly 1.09 million active cases as of right now. Keep that in mind for a moment in the context of stay-at-home orders more or less strictly applied around the country.
At the current case fatality rate of 5.95%, that means about 65k more deaths are baked in the cake as of right now, for a total of 155,000 deaths. This would be roughly by July 15.
I will be glad to be wrong and see the number fall, but I can't see why it should given the circumstances. Perhaps there will be improvement at the clinical care stage based on experiences to date. Hard to say.
One thing which might help is seeking help earlier. People have been afraid to go in to hospitals because they don't want to end up on a ventilator. There is evidence that seeking treatment earlier improves your odds.
That said, there is going to be disease spread picking up the pace as states re-open. The curve of infection has flattened precisely because of semi-quarantining of much of the population. Take that away and off we go again.
Ending stay-at-home will give new life to the epidemic in the US, and therefore to the death toll.
This isn't over by a long shot.
