While the press and government has been fixated on the infection rates for COVID 19, I've been spending time looking at the resulting numbers of deaths. I get my data directly from the CDC here out of table 1: Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Note that this is a provisional report, so numbers can and have increased, but not significantly so far. The chart below comes from that table and is all COVID-19 deaths by week. I've excluded the last week as the last week will never be complete until the next week is added. Now, lets compare that to the number of cases over time: What I am seeing is that even keeping lag time between infection and typical expiration of the infected patient that the second wave of infection is nowhere near as lethal as the first wave. I'm not a virologist nor any sort of a medical expert, but it looks to me like the most vulnerable people have already expired and that the threat has vastly decreased. Yeah, I know that we have improved treatments and the testing volume has increased, but I don't think that explains the very distinct difference between the first and second waves.
Well yeah the trump haters such as Como down to home workers conspired to let it loose in the nursing homes. At one point about 2/3 of the death count was just nursing home patients. You can't kill the most vulnerable twice. You and I aren't professional virus studyers. But we know viruses don't have intelligence and they don't want to kill people. So the virus didn't spread to nursing homes in all 50 states in 2 or 3 weeks just by coincidence.
back to my original point numbers can lie 1) more testing = more numbers proven positive. CVS has 30 min drive thru testing. When have we ever had flu testing? 2) the CDC site says, if you test positive for CoVID you might not have COVID you might have some other flu.
The numbers have less meaning as all the things stated above happen, most at risk dying, learning how to treat it, the virus changing, changes in testing, etc. At some point it transformed from an illness of unknown danger and no idea how far or fast it would spread, to a political foot ball used to gain desired ends and a means of controlling people. A few months ago Yang was a wild eyed liberal talking about a minimum income being a right, now the parties only argue about how much and how long the payments should made. We are living in a new world, and the only arguments are if it was caused by a virus, racism, police misconduct, or the rise of a political system that is far to the left.
Recently our governor came out and said he had tested + for the beer virus, next day he came out and said he got a more intense test done and he was negative for the virus. So, is he still counted as a new case or not? I do know someone who got the virus and recovered just fine. Other than that, I think a lot of this is just political, thought so from the start, cause orange man bad!
