
The Tragedy of the New Coronavirus Spikes - fortran77
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-tragedy-of-the-new-coronavirus-spikes
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zaroth
RealClearPolitics links to TFA, and just below links to this story as well,
“Where are all the deaths?”

[https://spectator.us/where-deaths-coronavirus-
wave/](https://spectator.us/where-deaths-coronavirus-wave/)

They both overstate their respective cases.

I also would toss this one into the mix, “CDC Now Estimates there have been
over 20 million Coronavirus cases”;

[https://outkick.com/cdc-now-estimates-there-have-been-
over-2...](https://outkick.com/cdc-now-estimates-there-have-been-
over-20-million-coronavirus-cases/)

The upshot is that this article could more accurately be titled _Where’s the
tragedy of the new Coronavirus spikes?_. Strip away the politics and we have a
huge uptick in case with in some cases the lowest death rates we’ve seen since
March.

The media keeps loosing the message in the midst of the disaster porn and
political finger-pointing. We need the economy to be open to the absolute
greatest extent possible while hospital capacity remains near maximum. The
long-term damage (in dollars and lives) in over-regulating the extent of the
lockdown could exceed the damage of COVID by an order magnitude.

Needless to say, the more cases we can shift forward into summer and fall,
versus having to deal with those cases in winter concomitant with flu season
is how we prevent the disaster of a second wave. Hospitals in winter can be
overwhelmed by a bad flu season alone, and COVID didn’t go exponential until
after flu had tapered this year. We do not want to see them peaking together
in vulnerable populations.

This drumbeat of articles like this just totally miss the point entirely, as
if we could just keep handing out trillions of dollars a month indefinitely
until a half billion doses of vaccine are ready to go, and as if even if we
did that we’re not inadvertently causing hundreds of thousands of death due to
side effects of quarantine and things like canceled elective procedures.

A lot has changed over the last couple months, but the media is still
“reporting” like it’s February.

~~~
klipt
Is it possible that Covid has already evolved to be less virulent?

Many a new (to humans) disease has started off unusually deadly, only to
evolve to keep its host alive longer to help further its spread.

~~~
zaroth
I doubt it? I think changing demographics of the people being infected is a
more obvious culprit. Hundreds of thousands of young adults (20-30) went out
in very large groups over the last month. At the same time we've finally
gotten better at actually protecting the elderly. This is the result;

[https://img.apmcdn.org/6b486323329122674a9b5fbfdcf2e51f9ad83...](https://img.apmcdn.org/6b486323329122674a9b5fbfdcf2e51f9ad83f8d/uncropped/8e1875-20200626-covid-
cases-age.png)

The younger demographic happens to be vanishingly unlikely to die, and highly
unlikely to even be hospitalized, from a case of SARS-CoV-2.

