this is 3,809 deaths per day and the average had not at the time been over 2,700 for any 7-day period so far, that that projection was made on December 31, so that seems like a rather bold prediction
If cases are in unprecedented territory, you should expect deaths to go into unprecedented territory. Forecasting deaths 3 weeks in the future should be easy, since it’s forecasting the progression of the disease among people already infected. You just take the number infected of cases and multiply by the CFR. At 220k cases/day and a CFR of 1.75%, that’s 3850 deaths/day, so that sounds totally reasonable.
(This is all from eyeballing 7-day rolling averages. I got the CFR from comparing the plateau of cases in September to the plateau of deaths in October. I haven’t checked if it has held up or what the lag should be. The 220k cases/day is the 7-day average peak at Christmas. So this requires assuming that the dip after Christmas was an illusion, which has been vindicated by the week since the prediction was made.)
Added: over at Zvi’s blog, Alexander Gordon-Brown claims that CDC does not predict 80k deaths, but that its point estimate is only 64k. Also, that the prediction is dated 12⁄21.
If cases are in unprecedented territory, you should expect deaths to go into unprecedented territory. Forecasting deaths 3 weeks in the future should be easy, since it’s forecasting the progression of the disease among people already infected. You just take the number
infectedof cases and multiply by the CFR. At 220k cases/day and a CFR of 1.75%, that’s 3850 deaths/day, so that sounds totally reasonable.(This is all from eyeballing 7-day rolling averages. I got the CFR from comparing the plateau of cases in September to the plateau of deaths in October. I haven’t checked if it has held up or what the lag should be. The 220k cases/day is the 7-day average peak at Christmas. So this requires assuming that the dip after Christmas was an illusion, which has been vindicated by the week since the prediction was made.)
Added: over at Zvi’s blog, Alexander Gordon-Brown claims that CDC does not predict 80k deaths, but that its point estimate is only 64k. Also, that the prediction is dated 12⁄21.