The Covid monthly fatality rate is down a stunning 97% from the high last year. The high was about 4.33% and on May 2, 2020 the current value on August 15, 2021 is .136%. This is about the same fatality rate as the regular, seasonal flu. However, the seasonal flu only lasts a couple of months. The pandemic will probably last for for some time yet and the fatality rate could potentially go up again as the virus mutates, though the normal evolutionary trend of such viruses is to become more mild, not more deadly.
The San Diego County Health Department continues to post the fatality rate as the average for the entire time from the start of the pandemic, which makes the fatality rate seem much higher than it currently is, almost 10 times as high at this time. This misrepresentation makes it seem that patients are almost 10 times as likely to die from Covid19 as is currently the case and contributes to the continuing public hysteria surrounding Covid.
The graph shows that although there are many more cases of Covid19 now, relatively few people are dying. It is a 30-day moving average of the case fatality rate derived from numbers provided by San Diego County. The case fatality rate is the percent of reported cases that will result in the death of the patient.
This only includes cases reported to the County. As we know, many infected people have very mild symptoms or no noticeable symptoms at all. For this reason, the case fatality data represented in the graph is no doubt over estimated. If the unreported cases were counted, the fatality rate would be even lower than the current 0.136%, maybe by half or more.
The reasons the fatality rate has gone down so much are development of more effective treatments by doctors, vaccination of the most vulnerable segments of the population and new variants may be less fatal than the original virus, as is the usual trend with such viruses. A less fatal virus provokes less reaction to it and tends to spread more easily and replace other variants.
If the San Diego County health officer, Wilma Wooten, refuses to publish the current fatality rate as it is for the current month, I will continue to post it here. You can subscribe to this blog by entering your email address in the box on the upper right.
Probably this situation in San Diego is not too much different from what is happening in the rest of the country.