Might be that deaths are being classified a bit differently now too. Just looking at https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-and-Select-Causes/muzy-jte6/data for the national level numbers/trend for “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (R00-R99)” look different from last year. I also heard someone claim that something of a spike in pneumonia deaths is happening but didn’t really see that in the data.
But I would also think some marginal improvement in treating patients and keeping them alive has occurred as well.
Another possibility (not sure how likely): maybe treatment capacity and protocols have improved?
Capacity is definitely higher, since this is much less concentrated than the first round.
Even if protocols have improved, deaths staying essentially flat since mid April while cases have grown ~5x is very strange.
Might be that deaths are being classified a bit differently now too. Just looking at https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-and-Select-Causes/muzy-jte6/data for the national level numbers/trend for “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (R00-R99)” look different from last year. I also heard someone claim that something of a spike in pneumonia deaths is happening but didn’t really see that in the data.
But I would also think some marginal improvement in treating patients and keeping them alive has occurred as well.