The Trump Administration Presents a False Choice Between Current COVID-19 Control Measures and 'No Intervention'
The COVID-19 projections presented at a White House briefing yesterday imagine two scenarios, one utterly fanciful and the other intolerably vague. With "no intervention," the main graph says, the United States could see 1.5 million to 2.2 million deaths from the disease. But "with intervention," it says, the number of COVID-19 deaths plummets to somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000.
The "no intervention" scenario is clearly counterfactual, since it ignores all the steps governments, businesses, and individuals already have taken to curtail the spread of COVID-19. The "intervention" scenario assumes continued...