But what is most relevant, is what is happening where you are. The WaPo reports on Covid are free for all to access. This table highlights the change in cases in the last 7 days, adjusted for population. A lot of red states are surging. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/?itid=sf_coronavirus_sn_coronavirus-us-cases-deaths_1
I learned today that an in-person working meeting held over several days at my company's office in the CA SF Bay area has resulted in at least half a dozen cases of covid. Mild cases because everyone who attended is vaxxed but jeez. That's three separate occasions in the past week that I've spoken to people I work with who caught covid or had family members who had it. CA, MA, VA.
There is no guarantee that the next mutation won't be more lethal. Scientists are always in fear of it happening, mostly because this virus has pulled more than a few tricks on us that we weren't expecting, like Long Covid, which is going to a serious (if not already) health problem for the foreseeable future. Hundreds of thousands are going to be suffering from it and that will impact our country in more ways than we might see now.
I have no idea why the death rate is down unless this variant is actually more like symptomatic cold, (and don't grab that phrase) with a bit of flu thrown in.
What I'm wondering is if people who have been infected two, three or four times with Covid even ever get immunity, because it appears that if you're getting reinfected with the same virus every time, there is no immunity to be had.
And what I'm thinking is the virus is coming back around to the same people, wreaking even more havoc, and causing death from repeated infections.
The interesting thing is that deaths have actually dropped a bit as we have climbed back up to 100k cases a day. We are now at Delta-wave infection levels, but the lowest covid death rate since covid became a thing.
Seems we have mostly run out of people naive to the infection between a combo of vaccination and infection. That, and increased treatments to vulnerable people. Monoclonals, paxlovid, molnupiravir, and it turns out that remdesivir is actually damn good but we were just using it wrong (turns out if you give it immediately upon a positive test, it's about as good as paxlovid).