Here are the New York Times’ graphs of the seven days moving average of new coronavirus cases and deaths. Because the lines represent the average of the last 7 days, they lag about 3.5 days behind the latest day.
The official case count seven day trailing average plateaued from about July 18-25 and has been falling since. Deaths kept rising until a few days ago, but the last few days have been promising.
If this really was a peak for deaths, it looks like the Case Fatality Rate has dropped about, say, 75% since April, due to some uncertain combination of more testing and better treatment. As you’ll recall, it was only at the very end of March that a few brave NYC emergency room doctors began to speak out against the ventilator obsession of the medical community and political class in favor of first trying to put patients on their stomachs. By late April, ER doctors were advising patients to monitor their own blood oxygen percent and come in for more oxygen as soon as it began to fall rather than until they had breathing problems, by which point much of the damage was already done.
But keep in mind that the USA is a continent-wide place, not a specific region like many European countries. Place that have avoided being hit hard yet are still at risk of getting whomped shortly.
A major question is how hard will be second waves? Madrid, which was hit hard in the early spring, appears to be rising again.
Consider New York City, which has had few cases or deaths in recent weeks, but then NYC tends to empty out in August even in non-plague years. Can it reopen after Labor Day like it normally does? NYC is probably closer to herd immunity than any other big city in the US, but is it close enough?
Another measure I like to track is Wikipedia’s list of “notable” individuals who have died of the virus because it’s easy to track ages and career trajectories. As I’ve been pointing out for several months, judging by this list, not that many people in their primes have died of CV in the U.S.. Back on July 5, Broadway character Nick Cordero died at age 41 after a terrible ordeal. Since then, 9 notable personages have died in the U.S., most famously 74-year-old Herman Cain. On the other hand, two of the nine deaths were over 100 years of age.
On the other hand, it’s still unclear how bad the long-term effects of CV will be. For example, the popular Twitter personality, Sciencing_Bi, a Hopi Indian born in Alabama who is a professor of queerness or whatever at Arizona State, came down with CV months ago, suffered from it in the Long Haul, and recently died of it.
But then somebody finally noticed that Hopi Indians live in the canyons near the Grand Canyon, not in Alabama, which has no canyons. It turned out that this Hopi science Twitter account, which would pile on in support of MeToo activist BethAnn McLaughlin, was a concoction of McLaughlin.
