[Airbornelawyer]

I don't know if I am just continuing to beat a dead horse here, but here is an update as of 15 July 2020 for the state case fatality rates from the 30 June 2020 version upthread. Numbers in yellow or red are the new 15 July CFRs.

You will see that, as noted in previous posts, the CFRs continue to decline in most states, in some cases significantly. The most obvious reason, and again I am repeating myself, is that the "spike" in cases being breathlessly reported in the media is mainly an artefact of increased testing. As the Swiss article above notes, though, the testing being done doesn't necessarily mean new infections; some of the infections are new, due to more public interactions, and some are just finding people who were already infected but were immune or asymptomatic, and had the residue of the virus in their systems. As there has not been a corresponding spike in hospitalizations or deaths, the CFRs have fallen because that's how ratios work.

It is the case, however, that the CFRs have not fallen, or have not fallen by very much, in the northeastern states hit first and hardest by the epidemic, notably the New England states, New York, New Jersey and Michigan, as well as Virginia and DC. The partisan in me might want to blame this on the poor response to the crisis by these mainly Democrat-run states, but I think another factor is simply that these states are further along the epidemic curve, and the virus has pretty much infected and killed most of whom it could. Essentially, they have reached their herd immunity threshold. So the growth in new cases and deaths are both low in absolute numbers, down 90-95% from the peak, and track with each other, so the CFR remains steady.

In the meantime, though, the mainstream media and their leftist political allies continue to salivate at the notion of a spike in the southern and western states, despite the evidence. Not only have hospitalizations and deaths not spiked as they hoped, but the falling CFRs make these states more comparable to the success stories the media have celebrated, like South Korea and Japan, and to a lesser extent Germany and Switzerland. South Korea especially was praised for strict quarantines, masking of the populace, and other measures of social control which most Americans generally find oppressive but which are beloved of a certain subset of Americans who believe they know better than you how to live your life.

So what is the CFR as of 15 July in South Korea, according to data from the WHO? It is 2.13%, higher than that of, among others, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and even California. Georgia, the state that even President Trump attacked for being one of the first to relax social distancing guidelines, and in which media sources like The Atlantic were predicting a deluge of dead bodies, has a death rate only slightly worse than South Korea, and better than Japan, Germany and Switzerland, and the Georgia rate is still falling.

Here, by the way, are the CFRs as of 15 July based on WHO data for selected countries. I generally avoided Third-World countries and others whose official data or data collection methods I would not consider reliable. I did include the PRC, even though their claimed numbers are highly questionable; even their likely low-ball number is worse than all but 8 U.S. states.

0.93% - Israel
1.05% - Australia
2.13% - South Korea
2.60% - India
2.66% - Czechia
2.82% - Norway
3.01% - United States of America (ex-NY/NJ/CT)
3.55% - Portugal
3.72% - Austria
3.86% - Brazil
3.98% - United States of America
4.13% - Poland
4.37% - Japan
4.54% - Germany
4.67% - Denmark
5.12% - Switzerland
5.43% - China (PRC)
6.80% - Ireland
7.30% - Sweden
11.07% - Spain
11.66% - Mexico
11.99% - Netherlands
14.38% - Italy
15.43% - United Kingdom
15.59% - Belgium