I know it’s a cliché, but Americans aren’t just bad at math, we super-suck at it.  And you’d think we’d be motivated to try harder.  The pandemic is, maybe, the one time when your life depends on getting the arithmetic right.  And yet, apparently, that’s not enough motivation.  The phrase, “I couldn’t solve that problem to save my life,” wasn’t just hyperbole.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, every day showed infection rates that grew exponentially. Since that’s what experts worldwide projected, and it’s what every other country experienced, the exponential growth wasn’t a surprise to anyone except every media outlet and every elected Republican politician.

When did the Republican Party devolve into this death cult thing? It’s like the GOP judges every action based on whether it’ll increase the fatality rate.  (Their other goal has been to weaken America’s standing internationally. With the pandemic, they get a twofer.) 

And the media?  Please save me from another headline about the infection rates ‘spiking’ when everything is neatly following the epidemiological curve.  Weren’t you listening in class that day, either?  The operative phrase remains, “exponential growth curve.” It’s why anyone who even vaguely understands math was pissing our collective pants when this first started.

But recently, one of the curves flattened. This graph was on the front page a recent New York Times:

(This chart is a terrible screen-grab.  See the original data at the Times.)

In the middle, you can see that when virus results hit around 30,000 new cases a day, the growth stopped.  It didn’t go down, but the new daily cases have held steady for a couple of weeks now at that (admittedly horrific) 30K number. 

Is this the flattening curve everybody talks about?  Does this mean we can all go to the movies again?!?

Lord, save me.  Jesus, Mary, and fucking Joseph, no!  Maybe all the numbers look alike? And as much as I’d be thrilled if that was true, “safety” is not what the data are telling us.

In America, our Coronovirus testing capacity seems to have topped out at around 100,000 tests a day.  We don’t have the will to do better. And I say ‘around’ because our magnificent and fully transparent federal government doesn’t release a lot of official testing results.  I’m guessing our miserably limp Federal performance might embarrass The Donald. I mean, please! The massive death rate at our nursing homes hasn’t shamed him yet.  Still, the COVID-19 numbers published by the American Clinical Laboratory Association (which covers all the private testing companies) suggests that our national testing topped 100,000 tests for a few weeks, then dropped to 70-80K a week. We topped 100K again for the past two weeks. Whoopie.

That stinks. I know I’m repeating a lot of better people than me, but 100K tests a week — and a leisurely one- to two-week turnaround on results — doesn’t cut it. America needs ten to a hundred times that volume. Everyone who isn’t an elected Republican knows that.

Sorry to keep harping on math, but here’s some quick algebra. America has around 331 million people. Testing 100,000 people a week means we can test one in 3000 of us. Oh, and we’re still waiting another week for the results.

With a 0.03 percent testing rate, how long do you think it’ll take us to find all the infected people? The answer is easy: never. It’s a fast-moving infection. We won’t get to a half-percent tested before we’ll have to start over.

Anyway, that plateau at “30,000 new positive cases every week”? It’s less comforting when you know that’s 30,000 positives out of just 100,000 tests completed. No, that number isn’t growing because we’re not testing any more people. All we know is that around a third of every test comes back positive. Every new week we test a new population, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter. No matter which population we test, we find the same 20-30 percent infection rate. 

What does that tell us? Well, when we only allow doctors to test the very sickest people, we see sky-high infection rates. The results may not reflect the general population.  Or it might. We can’t tell from here. Somehow, though, every new week finds another 30,000 new and sick Americans hitting the medical system.

No, I don’t see much the pandemic slowing down in those numbers.

How about the death rate?  It’s still growing, but not as quickly. Isn’t that a good sign? Maybe, but only as far as you trust the numbers. There’s a lot of wiggle room. Too many states aren’t counting all the deaths.  When New York reexamined recent deaths, they found a tranche of people who’d probably died from COVID-19 but hadn’t been tested. They added 3778 additional deaths to the totals, kicking the NY deaths over 10,000. That’s scary but more accurate. Heck, it’s probably conservative.

To avoid similarly scary numbers, the entire Republican Party has chosen to lie to us.  Deliberately, repeatedly, and viciously.  Maybe it seemed easier? (For them.) And by sidestepping everything important, they let us die by the tens of thousands.

Right. So, all you bad at math people?  Listen up.  That curve probably isn’t the epidemic flattening.  All it’s showing us are the limits or our measuring tool. Our limited virus testing just topped out.  I guarantee that if America magically ramped up SARS-Cov2 testing ten-fold, you’d see numbers that were a lot closer to the truth.  I hope they’d look better, but I don’t know the answer. All we have are a sucky testing capacity, no plan for the future, and a Republican Death Party that pillories everyone who speaks honestly.

[I talk about the Republican Party as a separate entity because most Republicans I know are normal, reasonable people. We sometimes disagree, but that’s the American experience. And, unlike the party officials, they’re not baldly lying to my face every time I ask a question.]

So, yeah, the moral of this story is that we don’t know the truth.  And until the data improves, we won’t know where the enemy is attacking or where it’s hiding. And for some inexplicable reason, Republicans are blocking every effort to mitigate this epidemic.  I assume it’s deliberate because nobody is that bad at math, not even the party of bad faith. Even now, Republicans are fighting against better testing, they’re cutting funds for the World Health Organization, they’re deliberately exposing voters to the virus, and undercutting essential tools like the U.S. Postal Service.

I can’t say the GOP isn’t dedicated. They’re willing to kill as many of us as it takes to keep themselves in power.

But without real testing, now or in the future, any plans you have to keep your families safe better include isolation for the foreseeable future. It’s not ending this week, this month, or this season.