Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why hasn’t the US second spike led to more deaths?

Photo by Victor J. Blue/Getty Images

Infections up 15 per cent in a fortnight, with 37,000 recorded in a day. For those who are inclined to see it that way, the graph of US Covid-19 cases is confirmation of the folly of reopening society far too soon, and ‘throwing away’ all that hard work during lockdown, as Matt Hancock likes to put it. 

But there is a little problem with this analysis: while the graph of cases in the US shows something which could be described as a second spike, the graph of deaths has stubbornly refused to follow suit. Quite the reverse: having peaked at over 2,000 deaths a day in April it is now down to around 600 a day and falling steadily.

Until the middle of May, the two graphs seemed to be coupled. Deaths trailed the number of new recorded cases by a fortnight, rising and falling in tandem. But then something strange happened. The fall in new cases began to falter and then to reverse. The number of deaths, on the other hand, carried on falling, as in a classic epidemic curve.

How come? There are four possibilities – or possibly a combination of all four. Either more cases are being recorded, as a result of ramping-up of testing; the disease is becoming less virulent; we are getting better at treating it; or the disease has started infecting less vulnerable groups.

There is support for all of those hypotheses. The US has now conducted 29 million Covid-19 tests, more than any other country. Moreover, the number of tests being performed has risen as the epidemic has progressed. The US has now conducted 87,000 for every million population – nearly half as many again as in Germany, a country that has been praised for its testing.

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