US Covid-19 Data

Macro Perspectives: Friday 14 August 2020

About a month ago, as all of the "spiking cases" hysteria was being peddled by the media, we took a sober look at the raw data and concluded that the rise in cases, was simply representing the slow closing of the gap between the reported infection rate and what the CDC believes to be the real infection rate (at least 10 times as many), while revealing a death rate that is converging toward the annual flu death rate.

That has indeed been the case. The rate of change in cases has only led to the rate-of-change in deaths-to-cases declining, and declining rapidly.

First, here's another look at the path of the "case fatality rate".

Despite the fears that the higher case numbers were going to result in more New York-like crises around the country, it hasn't happened. The death rate has gone down since mid-May, and it has done so for a couple of reasons:

1) treatment options are working, and

2) the large majority of people are simply defeating the disease on their own, and more of those types are being revealed with more testing - and those people are testing because they are being forced to test to return to work OR because they simply can, now that testing is, largely, open and free for asymptomatics.  

Remember, the CDC chief told us that we've likely only diagnosed about 10% of those that have, or have had, the disease in the US. That's based on surveys of blood samples taken around the country. So the CDC thinks the infection rate (i.e. cases) should be multiplied by a factor of 10.

That CDC projection now brings the number down within the range of annual flu deaths (0.33% in the above chart).

If we assume that the US are only diagnosing 1 out of 20, the COVID death rate goes to 0.17%. The 10-year average U.S. flu death rate is 0.13%.