Coronavirus in Decline

It is still frustratingly hard to get reliable information about what is going on with COVID-19. Official sources seem to so badly lag unofficial ones as to be useless or even harmful; bureaucracies are vast inert bodies, and perhaps also riddled with special interests pursuing their own agendas. In the media, political partisanship seems to be producing false information consistently. And experts in the field are all over the map, disagreeing on almost everything. You can find an expert to support any possible position.

One prominent expert now says the virus may be dying out naturally. As I noted here some time ago, this is actually the usual thing with epidemics. It does not necessarily have to do with vaccines or “herd immunity.”

I look at the graphs at Our World in Data, and it does look as though he may be right. Among the previously hard-hit countries, the death toll has been declining steadily for some time. Although none are anywhere near herd immunity.

Better treatments? Perhaps. But the number of new confirmed cases daily has also been declining at about the same rate. Despite the rapid “ramping up” of testing.

The result of lockdowns? I included Sweden in the mix last time, and the trend still held. I hear that Austria, Czechia, Norway, and Denmark have been out of lockdown for a few weeks, and this does not seem to have bent the curve upward for any. Denmark, Norway, and Austria are still going down in number of new cases. Perhaps more slowly than during the lockdown period in the case of Norway or Austria. Czechia is trending slightly up.

I hypothesized that this might have to do with the coming of summer and warmer, sunny weather. To test the hypothesis, I look at Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, and Australia, a selection of Southern Hemisphere countries. Presumably, they are now moving into the colder half of the year, so their reported cases should be going up, not down.

And they are—dramatically in the case of Chile or Brazil. Australia is an exception, but they have taken lockdown measures that may have prevented the virus from yet establishing a foothold. Mozambique, Angola, and Uruguay also have seen few cases overall.

Meanwhile, the WHO is announcing that, worldwide, numbers are still rising.

So it still looks to me as though a summer lull is the likeliest explanation, rather than viral suicide.

Either way, we should be able to safely come out of lockdown for the summer in the Northern part of the big blue marble.