Good News: Cases Rise… Deaths Fall

While the development has gotten scandalously little news coverage, the daily numbers of deaths with/of COVID has been declining with remarkable consistency for well over two months now.

On April 21, the seven-day rolling average for deaths with/of COVID was 2,225, according to the Worldomoters tracker. As of this writing, it is now down to 511, which, in a country of almost 330 million people, is statistically extremely small (for perspective, this time of year about 1,400 people die in nursing homes every single day). __ John Ziegler

The Case of the “Healthy Infected”
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…. the really major development is the continued decline in deaths. The virus’ spread is still “an epidemic to be sure, but an entirely manageable one,” as the PowerLine blog described it this week. We agree.

In the next few weeks, we’ll see whether the outbreak is truly finished. In the meantime, the political fear stampede over “soaring new coronarvirus cases” has to end. And when it does, we hope Americans call the left to account for its attempt to use a pandemic to destroy our republic. __ Issues and Insights

Wuhan CoV mortality approaches 0.1% by some measures

Fizzling out

Asymptomatic spread of Wuhan virus is rare

Importance of the Age Skew

The media and many politicians — such as Gavin Newsom — are simply making fools of themselves, hoping that their political calculations will not come back to bite them in the perineum.

For Covid-19, the elderly have been overwhelmingly the worst hit. For the Spanish flu of 1918, the young working-age population were severely affected too. In fact, the death rate from pneumonia and influenza that year among 25-34 year olds in the United States was more than 50% higher than that for 65-74 year olds, “a remarkable difference to Covid-19.”

This, as the strategist then notes, therefore begs the question of how history will judge the lockdown response to Covid-19, given its much more limited impact on workers in the economy. In short, we have an interesting situation at the moment, where rapidly rising cases in the US are slowing reopenings (negative) but the death rate is falling (positive). __ Source

Chinese Coronavirus Age Skew
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What Has This Several-Months’ Panicked Stampede Been About?

“It was never about the virus but instead the election,” Brian C. Joondeph, a medical doctor practicing in Denver, recently wrote at the American Thinker. “The so-called surge in cases is more fake news pushed by media cheerleaders eager to destroy the U.S. economy and culture if it makes Trump a one-term president.” __ I&I

Radical governors, mayors, and health officials have instituted policies that will result in more deaths in the long-term than would have resulted from following a “modest social-distancing, but no lockdown” policy.

… the news media [is] making the situation appear far worse than it actually is [to] keep Trump’s fading re-election chances down, but it is greatly harming the country. Not that such a reality matters to the news media anymore.

Sweden, a country much maligned in the media because they dared to not lock down by government mandate, has “new case” and “death” charts which look remarkably similar to ours, and their daily death rate has recently been down to single digits (shhhh … please don’t tell our news media!). __ NYP

The health of the economy plays an integral role in the health of the population. The feigned ignorance by leftist politicians on this issue is fooling no one. They fully intend to create genuine hardship — leading to real deaths — in order to try to swing the November elections in their favor.

We’re gonna need a lot more guillotines!

More:

Cases Surge, Deaths Fall . . . Reason Magazine

In Texas, newly confirmed cases rose 13-fold, from 623 to 8,258, between May 25 and July 4 before falling to 3,449 yesterday. The number had risen six-fold as of two weeks ago, and by now that increase should be having an impact on daily deaths. Yet the rolling seven-day average of daily deaths has risen only modestly since Memorial Day, from 26 to 32. Meanwhile, the crude case fatality rate for Texas, which peaked at 3.4 percent on April 30, has continued to fall, reaching 0.5 percent yesterday.

In Utah, new cases jump, but new deaths fall

The total current COVID-19 hospitalizations now stand at 192. Of the state’s nearly 1,300 ventilators, 195 are in use.

COVID-19 cases on the rise in 40 US states but deaths continue to fall

Experts say this downward trend reflects the large share of cases among young adults, who are more likely than older ones to survive COVID-19

And the surge in cases reflects the surge in testing, which detects asymptomatic and low symptomatic cases that would have been ignored otherwise. With any virus other than this political celebrity virus, most cases would naturally be ignored as not worth consideration (see graph at top of page).

Is it possible the media is over-reacting?

Sweden’s experience tells a different story than the media is telling — read on past the headline. The models predicted 28,000 deaths in Sweden, but only 2800 died — one order of magnitude less than predicted. It seems clear that the government health system of Sweden consciously chose to sacrifice a number of its elderly in order to maintain its ICU capacity for a predicted wave of younger critical patients which may never materialize. Would it really make sense to put chronically ill and mentally impaired nursing home patients in a medical ICU, on a ventilator — when their chances of survival in any event is extremely low? That is the calculation that government officials in Sweden made.