It's a Deadly Puzzle

As noted at Slate, COVID Cases Are Rising, COVID Deaths Are Declining, Why?

I'd been wondering about this.  Increased testing, a drastic lower shift in the median affected age, improving treatments; any and all of these could be behind this phenomenon.  I was guessing that it was increased testing driving this, but that was only a guess.

Digging around on the web however found that the number of tests administered per day in the U.S. is down by about 25% since the start of June. [edit 6/20: chart has changed, tests are UP about 20% since the start of June.  OK, things now make a lot more sense.] Not at all what one would expect, but there it is.  And this is right on top of when the number of confirmed cases began to rise.  Doubly perplexing.

So now for hypothetical causes, we have increased testing, lower median age, improving treatments, and the possibly that this troublesome yet fragile little 30k of RNA is starting to fray with repeated replication errors.  That last one would be really, really good news, but there's no hard data showing that this is happening.  The other three causes, yes, there's hard data there.  In what proportions?  Not enough information surrounding the data to tell.

Maybe we'll bumble into herd immunity sooner than we thought, and with somewhat less pain than we'd feared.  In the meantime, there's a world of people out there saying "hold my beer, watch this" and rushing out to do something stupid.  Don't be stupid.