The coronavirus in one city

The IHME model forecasts that the Wuhan coronavirus will reach its peak in Washington, D.C. around the end of this week. However, Muriel Bowser, D.C.’s mayor, says she is using a different model, and that her model predicts a peak of hospitalizations from the virus in June.

I must be missing something. Weren’t most of the people whose infection will drive the number of hospitalizations in June free of the virus as of yesterday (April 12) when Bowser made her remarks? (And didn’t nearly all of the remainder contract the virus after D.C.’s social distancing and stay-at-home measures went into effect in late March?) If so, then Bowser must be saying that future infections will cause that supposed June peak.

I could understand such a prediction if Bowser planned to lift the social distancing and stay-at-home measures currently in place. However, Bowser has strongly indicated that she intends to keep them in place until at least the end of May.

Bowser reasonably credits her social distancing and stay-at-home measures with having suppressed the number of infections in D.C. And she must believe that the continuation of the measures will continue to have that effect.

How, then, can it be true that the peak of this pandemic in D.C. in terms of hospitalizations will occur in June, by which time the social distancing and stay-at-home measures will have been in place for at least nine weeks?

As I said, I must be missing something.

NOTE: As of yesterday, April 12, the District of Columbia had 1,875 reported cases of the Wuhan coronavirus and 50 total deaths from it.

The IHME model, which assumes rigid social distancing and stay-at-home measures through the end of May, forecasts 117 total deaths from the virus in D.C. It also forecasts that, by the end of that month, there will be virtually no deaths and no hospital resource utilization attributable to the virus.

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