https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-r...
Even with lack of leadership, we have had ~ 200k, a 90% reduction. Not too bad?
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
The 2.2 million figure came from the worst case scenario. The assumptions for that scenario are:
"In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months."
You don't get to claim a reduction from a baseline that assumes 0 intervention and 0 personal behavior change. That figure was used in the report as a baseline to compare various mitigation and suppression strategies.
Of course the US still delayed at the federal level for another 2 weeks to do really anything of substance. The governments responsible for reducing the death toll from 2M To 200K are the state governments of NY and California. The US federal government largely delayed advocating a shutdown until 2 weeks later. Even on April 4th the President was still saying Covid-19 was “going away” [1].
I encourage everyone to go look at the new cases curve on the days proceeding and following April 4th to see what utter complete bullshit such a statement was. Worse, he knew it was bullshit even as he said it, as the conversations with Bob Woodward have revealed.
To give the US federal government a grade of “not too bad” is disingenuous. Their discordant and adversarial response is why we have 200K deaths.
1- https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/politics/coronavirus...
...New York has almost the worst death rate in the country (only New Jersey is higher).
Comparing across US states, it really does look like doing nothing would've resulted in less death.