US at 1900 dead today. Bad day for Canada too at 54, CBC already has 22 more in Ontario for tomorrows numbers. I was really hoping we'd see a bit more stability due to the lockdown measures by now.
Well in the US, we went from doubling of cases/deaths happening every 3 days to a week so that is an improvement. It's too early to tell how much different measures like voluntary social distancing, mandatory lockdowns, masks, and increased testing affect the rate of growth. Therefore, we can't really know yet how much we can return to normal before the vaccine is available.
I think the two important things to keep in mind is that the rate of infection is still accelerating, despite all the new measures, and that the mortality rate also appears to be increasing. Although mortality might just look like it is increasing because we don't have enough testing capacity to confirm every mild case. So it's possible that the numbers show 30k confirmed new cases a day but the actual number might be around 100k new cases, in which case the mortality rate would actually be staying steady at around 1-2% rather than the 5% that the numbers seem to be showing right now.
Note it seems the US only has a capacity of like 100k tests per day:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/07/coronavirus-testing-173607So unless we massively reduce/level off the number of new cases/day, it doesn't seem like our testing capacity will ever catch up.
