Originally Posted by
iahphx
The left-leaning Atlantic magazine COVID tracking project has a chart showing USA hospitalizations (nearly real time) and deaths (not real time due to the way US states record and count COVID deaths). You can obviously see US hospitalizations are now in freefall (the end of the Sunbelt spike is producing the same gompertz curve that we saw when the Northern wave ended in spring) but deaths are still nearly constant. After the inevitable bureaucratic delay and possible "death laundering," USA deaths will also dive. Check back in a month and this will be beyond obvious. As deaths collapse, it will be harder for the media and politicians to gin up COVID fear, so the declining death numbers should lead to an even larger increase in travel.
https://covidtracking.com/data
They're declining, but that's not "free fall". It more or less mirrors the decline in positive tests. My point is simply that the best models have been pretty accurate at predicting the course of the illness in the US, the one I posted above is based entirely on death data (because that's the least affected by things like testing rates), and we will see a parallel decline in death rates, but crucially according to these models it is not going to go down as far as New York and New Jersey have. Basically only in New York and the area around there did people get the fear of God (or biology) and did they really lock down fairly hard, long enough to get the case counts down.
In any case, those models have been pretty accurate thus far. The one I posted predicted death rates would start to fall around now but the curve they project isn't going to be a steep fall like NYC or the Northeast but a more gradual decline, so by November it's still going to be going on, about at the level we were in early July. Which is to say, not great.
However, of course there may be some treatment breakthroughs that could help a lot -- things can change.
For me, I'm in South Korea right now and plan to stay here until things stabilize in the US. I look forward to these lounges reopening (I never got to even try the new LAX lounge -- did it actually ever open?) ... when I feel safe to return to the US, which I currently am not counting on doing until mid 2021. Meanwhile, just working weird hours remotely, and holding on to my cards for the time they'll actually be useful again someday.