Cases vs Deaths: The Covid Puzzle
I have been looking at graphs showing new cases and deaths for Santa Clara Country, where I live, and the contrast between the two patterns is striking. Judged by new cases, things started to get worse around the beginning of June, and rose pretty steadily thereafter. The peak was June 23rd, at a level about ten times what it had been a month before.
The pattern of deaths is entirely different. It peaked in mid-April at six deaths a day, fell by May 8th to one death a day, and has been averaging a little less than one death a day ever since. There is no sign that the increase in cases led to an increase in deaths.
One would expect deaths to lag detected cases by two or three weeks, but the increase started in early June and, as of July 5th, a month later, there is no visible increase in the death rate.
Two possible explanations occur to me. One is that increased testing has resulted in detecting many more of the mild cases, in which case the apparent increase in cases is an illusion. The other is that, at this point, the most vulnerable people either are being very careful, as I am — my family has been self-quarantining since mid-March — or have already gotten the disease and either died or recovered. The people who are getting it now are younger, healthier, and much less likely to die of it.
Looking at death rates for the U.S. as a whole, I see a similar pattern, minus the initial high, presumably because it was smeared out by happening at different times in different states. Death rates peaked on April 21, have been roughly constant ever since. The pattern of cases is again similar, but not identical, to that in Santa Clara Country, rising until the beginning of April, gradually declining until early June, then rising almost three-fold by the end of the month.
U.S. Cases
U.S. Deaths
The other striking thing, of course, is that this pattern doesn't seem to be mentioned in the media. There is a lot of talk about increasing number of cases, not accompanied, at least in what I have seen, by any mention of the fact that the number of deaths is not increasing.
Part of the reason may be that the pattern is less striking in the case of the U.S. as a whole, where effects are smeared out by different timing in different states. Allowing for about a three week lag between detection of a case and a resulting death, the effect of the increase in U.S. cases should be only starting to show up in the death rate. It's much clearer in the data from Santa Clara County.
The other part of the reason, I suspect, is bias. There is a lot of pressure to persuade people that Covid is a serious problem in order to get them to wear masks and engage in social distancing, so evidence that it is less of a problem than it seems, that the surge in cases is not resulting in a surge in deaths, is likely to be downplayed in most of the media. In addition, making Covid look bad makes Trump look bad, and most of the media are hostile to Trump.
P.S. A commenter points out that the topic has not been entirely missed by the media. The New York Times had an article on July 3d noting that the increase in cases had not yet been reflected in death rates and discussing possible explanations.
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