This is false. Deaths were down, but they have been climbing again for the last three weeks. Mortality is a lagging indicator to infections, so what we're seeing right now is mortality from the earliest stages of reopening.
> illnesses are less severe
This is also false. There may be some factors that are combating more severe symptoms (e.g. greater vitamin D, if that turns out to be a real effect), but the virus hasn't recently become somehow less potent.
> ICUs are not overwhelmed
False again. In the current hotspot states -- Florida, Arizona, and Texas -- ICU capacity in many areas is strained or overwhelmed as is the rest of the hospital infrastructure:
"ICU beds, ventilators in use hit new records as Arizona reports 1,357 new COVID-19 cases": https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/20...
"Florida coronavirus: 52 hospitals max out ICU capacity as cases increase": https://www.wfla.com/8-on-your-side/investigations/florida-c...
"Texas hospitals are running out of drugs, beds, ventilators and even staff": https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/14/texas-hospitals-coro...
Note that all of these articles are over a week old. The situation hasn't improved since then.
Deaths are rising in counties that hadn't had significant exposure to covid19 before, and already the trend is heading down across the board. Deaths will be climbing in a couple of hotspots for the next 2 weeks, but total deaths in the entirety of the USA shouldn't exceed 280k.
I agree the virus hasn't become less potent, but hospitals have gotten much, much better at treatment. Remdesivir in particular makes a big difference. Spread in long term care facilities are now tracked nationwide, with terrific results. So the CFR is down by a lot, even though the virus hasn't changed.
Nobody in the US is being denied care because the ICUs are full. Yes, some hospitals are strained but this is not at all unusual. You'll find similar articles about maxed out ICUs from 2018, 2016, etc. First hit on google from jan 2018: "Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents" (https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...). Moving patients to hospitals with spare capacity isn't that big of a deal. Bear in mind that Hospitals are for profit and ICU beds are extremely expensive. As a consequence hospitals target 85%+ ICU utilization throughout the year, otherwise they're losing money.
Didn't the Texas Tribune just misreport the data? https://twitter.com/VanceGinn/status/1287940050752286721
You mean the rate of increase of the increase in deaths is heading down...across the board?
Even if we don't have a solid treatment plan, we have more knowledge now than we did before. Triage is about saving as many people as you can by not allocating resources on those who are too far gone, or not far enough. Surely we have better bounds on those conditions now.
We probably also have fewer people suffering from side effects of treatments that have been proven ineffective. Those complications could push some patients from critical condition to dead.
> This is also false.
I agree it's false. One reason people think it's true is that very much more testing is happening, so we're seeing people with milder symptoms getting tested positive. Before they just wouldn't have been tested.
But the same thing is just not happening everywhere. People don't seem to accept that. You average in declining cases and deaths in NY, say, and it obscures what's happening in Texas. Same on an international scale.
I am not. Look at the rate of change in daily deaths in NY versus Texas. It's a big difference.
Deaths relative to cases are down...
> Mortality is a lagging indicator to infections, so what we're seeing right now is mortality from the earliest stages of reopening.
...even accounting for lag.
> There may be some factors that are combating more severe symptoms (e.g. greater vitamin D, if that turns out to be a real effect), but the virus hasn't recently become somehow less potent.
Then why are deaths down? Why is no other state repeating anything close to what New York went through?
> False again. In the current hotspot states -- Florida, Arizona, and Texas -- ICU capacity in many areas is strained or overwhelmed
Nowhere does it say "overwhelmed". At or near capacity is not "overwhelmed". It's better to ring the alarms sooner than later, of course.
As a matter of experimental practice, however, there should be sufficient information to infer whether or not to expect much seasonal variation in COVID-19 infections. The pandemic emerged at the end of winter in the northern hemisphere. It is now full-on summer. In the southern hemisphere, however, the sign is flipped. It is now full-on winter.
Unfortunately, the Covid pandemic is now a high-statistics event. There are oodles of cases in locations that span the full gamut of humidity and temperature distributions. Societal variations (policy, economics, politics, etc.) complicate the experiment, but the opportunity to make a reasonable quantitative statement on the impact of seasonal climatic variation on Covid transmission is surely there.
There isn't really a "full-on winter" in the southern hemisphere except in the southernmost parts of Chile/Argentina/Australia or in New Zealand. That makes it difficult to compare.
The cross-society systematic uncertainties are the major challenge, as every country and culture is attacking this thing differently (and NZ is crushing it). If there is a strong seasonal effect, it should be apparent throughout global datasets, both from a latitude-dependent dynamic in the northern hemisphere and variation with opposite sign for locations with equal and opposite latitude.
It is my continued guess that meaningful bounds on any seasonal effect are not inaccessable.
From US data alone, it is clear that R_0 is not impacted by a factor of ~2-5 by summertime climate. We're still losing.
I think this is the point. They are not saying it could get worse in winter months, they are saying that summer is not a "low season" and that it will spread just fine without controls. The data supports that.
edit: In fact, take a look at Brazil or India, places that are hot year round. They have very few instances of the flu no matter the time of year. This shows that it doesn't spread much in warm weather. We already know that covid-19 does spread in warm weather.
I would argue that it doesn't show that. Nobody is testing for Influenza if it's just a "mild" case. What is being tracked is deaths from pneumonia that are attributed to Influenza.
If you look at the mortality in India or Brazil, it's way lower than in countries further from the equator. You also would expect testing capacity to be lower, so there's likely more unknown cases there.
Do all pandemics work that way more or less?
The other aspect the lackadaisical are ignoring is that the morbidity rate is only where it is because the number of critical patients is hovering around the carrying capacity of our medical infrastructure. More cases means a dog-leg in deaths because they will have to give up on people to save others. There will be no more heroic actions to save mom or dad once you can fill the ICU entirely with people with far better prognoses. Mom isn't going into the ICU because it's already full of athletes and people under 30. She's going on morphine and you can say goodbye over a phone.
Look at the numbers:
We see that deaths are down and that illnesses are less severe (ICUs are not overwhelmed), even though daily infections are at all-time-highs in some regions. Coincidence, or perhaps due to seasonality?
We also see that the virus can not be brought under control without permanent lockdowns. As soon as you open up, the virus starts spreading again. Countries that now have the virus "under control" have had a significant amount of uncontrolled spread beforehand.
I've read several headlines along the lines of "resurgence of cases after opening up" or "second wave under way" in Europe. Then I look at the graphs and it's just not true. Cases are stable, you just have some daily variance.