DE-HYPEING THE SURGE

The surest sign that all the hype around the surge in Covid-19 cases is, well just hype, is this. In mid June, IHME, the government's favorite model, put out their "forecast" of the future of Covid-19 in the US as they have done periodically since the beginning of the "crisis." The screenshot below is from June 22nd. When this particular forecast was done, the "surge" in cases was well under way and the fear mongering was beginning to ramp up. Here is their projections for deaths ending on October 1st.

In June they were projecting deaths of 201,129 by October 1st. Nothing has changed with the trajectory of cases, they have continued to rise. In fact they have risen even faster than anyone expected, primarily driven by a tremendous amount of testing. Based on this increase in cases, one would expect deaths to increase, given the hype around the "surge crisis"  common sense would seem to say that these "spikes"  would be reflected in future projections of deaths. Here is a screen shot taken on July 5th of IHME's next forecast for deaths in the US.

 
As you can see, the new projection has dropped 26,000 deaths from their previous forecast. Why? Simple really, despite the "surge" in cases, deaths are not keeping up with their modeled forecast. By the way every time the virus does not follow their projections, they change the format, adding something to keep people captive, this time it is masks. Since ventilators and ICU beds are no longer viable to promote their fear porn they just add masks as the new scary thingy for all of us to obsess over.
For those people out there just waiting for all these cases to suddenly turn into deaths, as they did in New York in March and April I would make two points. According to New York City's own Health Department records, the city's peak in deaths was the day before their peak in cases. This simple fact indicates that deaths decreased, not increased when cases were at their highest. Two weeks after the most cases ever recorded on a single day in NYC there were 290 LESS deaths than at their peak.
You get a sense of that little inconvenient truth from this graph. This is for the entire nation. Courtesy Phil Kerpen
@kerpen

If the number of cases was the only indicator of future deaths, what has happened since April 12th? It is all well and good to say that Florida is having thousands of new cases a day, so why haven't deaths kept up with them? Even with a built in lag time. For the first two months of the pandemic, deaths and cases rose almost together, but beginning in April they began to diverge from each other, and now drastically so.
One of the things, among many, that was learned in the first couple of months, was that in fatal cases, the average time from onset to death was about twenty days. But even given that twenty day lead time, like New York,  deaths are not keeping up with cases. Here is what it looks like graphically with the lead time.

The decline in deaths relative to cases is only slightly less dramatic given a three week differential. The last data point on the above chart is just a week ago and I can assure you, deaths are still dropping. In fact,  deaths are now so low that Covid-19 may soon no longer qualify, by CDC guidelines, as an epidemic in the United States.
There are reasons for this dramatic difference between cases and deaths, but it is not in the media narrative to investigate, explain, or report on them. But the numbers are the numbers and the numbers of deaths should continue to fall, to the chagrin of the merchants of fear.