Better treatment?

Better protection (Or exhaustion of supply) of most vulnerable?

Masks and/or enhanced cleaning limiting initial inoculum size?

Viral mutation to lower pathogenicity?

For whatever reason, the case fatality rate - once over 7% - is certainly coming down.

CFR was never ACTUALLY anywhere near 7%.

Reported CFR could drop for any of the reasons you mentioned, you'd certainly EXPECT it drop as the medical community gains more experience with covid... they have some smart people.

Also initially, covid had pretty free access to all of the population. But today, most people actually self-select their own covid exposure opportunity... that can be based on personality or politics, but is probably mostly based on an individual's known risk factoes. So you'd expect most of the people getting covid now to be lower risk. You could call that better protection of the at-risk population, but I think it's fundamentally folks making their own (mostly common-sense) choices.

And there are a significant % of low/asymptomatic cases out there, essentially none of those were counted in the early days.

Also I believe NY gave up the practice of seeding nursing homes with typhoid marys?

Data collection problems are indeed a big issue, especially internationally. And if the asymptomatic cases that aren’t being detected are actually - as some studies suggest - 10 cases for every case counted, that decreases true case-fatality rates even further, to little worse than the influenza case-fatality rate in a bad year.

Much greater testing capacity is capturing mild and asymptomatic disease that would have never been diagnosed in March/April.

This, combined with better treatment protocols, is driving down both Case Fatality Ratio (confirmed positive cases) and Infection Fatality Ratio (actual estimated infections).

CDC’s “best estimate” currently is an IFR of 0.003% for the under-20 demographic, 0.02% for 20-49, 0.5% for 50-69, and 5.4% for 70+ year olds.

Lower CFR is good and to be expected when we’ve prevented hospital saturation (thus far). Most countries I go to are still complying with social distancing and mask rules, certainly better than some states I’ve been to. I’ll be curious to see what the excess deaths are at the end of the year.

Now we move the goal posts to "long lasting effects"

Exactly... Que CNN reporting in 3...2....1...

Doesn’t matter. The flying public has already spoken. Their numbers are staying at ~25% of 2019 levels until there is an acceptable vaccine that is administered and taken by a large swath of the country.



Good luck to us all

Actually, it’s sneaking up around 30%. But you do realize it is entirely possible that:

may never happen, right?

We have averaged about $400 million a year in research on an HIV/AIDS vaccine since 1987 when the first AIDS vaccine trial was done. No luck so far.

The flying public doesn’t care. They’ll wait. We’ll be lucky if all 330 million have access to a vaccine by year end. Seems pilots are counting on a quick bounce back. Those experts must be crazy to suggest recovery in 2024 to get back to 2019 levels.



You never did answer where you went after Compass? You at a big 3?