re: Daily COVID Updated as of 11/2/20 8:00 PM

Do ya'll think this is a fair summary of the present situation:

Daily death toll (not rate) has plummeted almost 80% - despite the big pick up in confirmed cases and rate of positives per test. This would seem to imply one or more of several things:

--the vulnerable are successfully self-isolating

--less vulnerable populations don't seem to have much overall risk of severity

--we are getting better at treatment

--as infections have picked up in non-NYC geographies, viral load per infection is much lower - meaning severity of impact is much lower

--current serological extrapolations imply about 8X wider infection than the confirmed numbers indicate. This puts the death rate around 80bps...essentially, the big remaining question is where in the range of 20bps - 80bps we will ultimately wind up

--there are a couple of alarming outliers - Houston and Yakima both appear to have maxed out their ICU beds


To me - it seems like good/great news almost all the way around. At the very least, cause for cautious optimism...right?