Soaring cases, falling deaths.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

The 7-day average of daily U.S. deaths from COVID-19 was 712 on October 17; 849 on September 17; 1,349 on August 18 (Aug 17th was an anomaly); and 901 on July 17.

If you fail to see a soaring death toll in those shrinking numbers, you have spent too little time reading newspaper headlines and too much time looking at facts.

If you think rising cases (positive tests) are more important than falling deaths, we could easily get cases to stop rising within a week. All it would take is to stop the unprecedented testing of students and younger workers --who were almost never tested until recently. Many were presumably positive for a week or two in the past six months too, but they never knew it because they didn't feel sick and couldn't get tested. Now they know they've tested positive, thanks to mandatory testing results. But they still have no symptoms (which is why they're rarely contagious) and they still get over it in 10-14 days.

Sections of the country last to be much affected by COVID-19, like the Midwest recently and Southeast in July, were more vulnerable because so few of their residents had recovered from a mild case and acquired some immunity. Yet the Midwest today, like the Southeast this summer, is relatively better prepared by having more hospital beds per 1000 than the Southwest or West Coast (Washington suffered one of the first serious nursing home outbreaks).

http://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/the-territorial-impact-of-covid-19-managing-the-crisis-across-levels-of-government-d3e314e1