Where is This News About the Virus?

 Did you know that the second wave of the virus was different than the first?  Did you ever even hear that discussed in the media?  I doubt it.  

Let me explain:  

1.  There were two "waves" of infection in the USA.  The first hit in March and continued into April.  We got to the point where there were like 35,000 new cases reported each day, and then the case numbers declined until a point in June.  The second wave hit as the numbers of new cases took a big jump starting in June and continuing into about mid-July.  In that wave, the daily number of new cases went from about 20,000 up to 70,000.  Since then the daily new case numbers have fallen to about 40,000.

2.  So what is the big difference between the two waves?  It's this: the same virus hitting the same country is resulting in many, many fewer deaths.  During the height of the first wave, we were seeing 2500 deaths per day.  During the second wave, twice as many cases resulted in a peak of only 1400 deaths per day (which is now down to about 1000 per day).  So the mortality per case for the second wave is about a quarter of what it was during the first wave.

How can it be that the same virus hitting the same population resulted in such a lower death rate?  There are four possible explanations:

1. It isn't the same virus; it mutated.  That could cause the virus to be less lethal, but the scientists and doctors working on vaccines have confirmed that there has been no mutation of this sort.

2.  During the first wave, fools like NY governor Cuomo ordered sick people taken in as patients in nursing homes that were ill equipped to handle them with the result that the virus spread quickly to all the patients in the homes.  Cuomo caused about 11,000 extra unnecessary deaths in NY.  During the second wave, no governors made such egregious errors.  That is part of the answer, but it is far from enough to account for the full story.

3.  Treatment of the virus has improved.  That's certainly part of the equation as well.  Hospitals and doctors know better how to deal with the virus and some new treatments have been developed.  The date shows though that this doesn't explain the big difference between the two waves.  The number of people hospitalized each day during the second wave never made it as high as it did during the first wave.  In other words, 35,000 new cases per day during the first wave generated more hospitalizations that 70,000 cases per day during the second wave.  Obviously, this isn't affected by better hospital treatments.

4.  There were many, many more tests.  During the first wave, daily testing hit about 40,000 per day in March rising to just over 100,000 per day in April.  During the second wave, daily testing was in excess of  700,000 tests per day.  All those tests found huge numbers of people with no or very few symptoms of the virus.  In other words, the big numbers of new cases consisted in great part of people who wouldn't have even been diagnosed during the first wave.

If you assume that the death rate from the virus would have been reduced by 30% during the second wave due to better treatments and the absence of moronic moves like Governor Cuomo's order on nursing homes, you can use the adjusted number of deaths to compare the actual severity of the second wave to the first.  That calculation tells us that the first wave was about 75% more severe than the the second wave.  That's right, the huge second wave was just over half as serious as the first.

In July, President Trump told the nation that the reason for the big uptick in cases was that there were so many more tests being done.  The media laughed at him and said he was ignoring the "science".  Now the data shows that Trump was right and the media was wrong.  Trump was only telling us what the government scientists had themselves concluded. And now, when all the data shows the actual reality, we don't get the true story.