End the BS wrote:
For the last two months, France and Spain have a big resurgence of cases, but practically no deaths. So what's happening? Some options:
1. Covid has mutated to a less deadly form (scientists can't seem to agree if this is true or not)
2. Covid is affecting a less vulnerable segment of the population (seems unlikely to explain massive differences in cases vs. deaths)
3. Treatment has improved dramatically (probably explains some fraction of change, but certainly not all)
4. Deaths are being counted differently (e.g., initially any infection at the time of death was coded as a Covid death, now only if it is clearly the primary cause of death). To me, this seems like the most likely explanation.
All possibilities, although I don't know to what degree your #1 is realistic or demonstrated, I hope for it to be true. Overall fatalities are occurring at a much lower rate than they were in peak pandemic. My own belief is that the biggest factor is the average age of infected people is much lower, and in particular vulnerable populations (especially those in congregate living) are being protected.
I'll add:
5. Better testing, so that the number of reported cases is closer to actual cases. The case fatality rate (CFR) is (reported fatalities) / (reported cases) and if the denominator (cases) is higher, then CFR is lower. This gives us a CFR that is closer to the IFR, or infection fatality rate, a theoretical but incalculable ratio of true fatalities (unknowable) to true cases (ditto).
Globally, if we exclude the beginning when cv-19 was confined to China, daily CFR peaked at ~ 8-9% around mid to late April. It's currently hovering at about 1.8%.
We can distinguish between the total CFR and daily CFR by dividing either the cumulative totals or the daily totals. The global total CFR (all fatalities to date divided by all cases to date) is ~ 3.2%, which is higher than the current daily value I mentioned above (1.8% as of yesterday).
These values vary around the world. I won't share values for individual countries, but I've got the following approximate values for various selected regions of the world:
Region - total CFR / current daily CFR
North America - 4.7% / 1.3%
Europe - 4.2% / 1.2%
South America - 3.6% - 2.6%
Central Am. / Carib. - 3.5% / 3.5%
Africa - 2.6% / 2.8%
SE Asia - 1.4% / 2.1%
There's some speculation that initial higher effects were felt in areas / countries that didn't get hit as hard by the flu in the previous couple of flu seasons, or in other words places with a larger vulnerable population.