Covid is certainly no joke. I keep complaining about no info, so I figured I'd provide a couple references (direct from U.S. and CA sources). Sorry to dog pile, but I feel like this is important.
It seems that there are some hopeful signs that we may be getting a better handle on managing the virus. A few graphics (focusing on fatalities, which in my opinion is the most useful metric to follow)...
Graphic 1: U.S. covid deaths per week. Shows a possible slowing death rate for each surge. This should be taken with a grain of salt, because it's a large country, and lumps everyone together.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/
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Graphic 2: California deaths by county, showing the Los Angeles area has over half of the deaths (it's a very large and diverse state). Hence why my focus on L.A. County in the next graphic.
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Graphic 3: L.A. County case and death charts. The most recent few weeks is questionable since surges in deaths are delayed behind surges in cases... BUT, if you look at the daily rates in May vs July vs Nov, there is a definite trend downward [
relatively speaking] of deaths compared to the number of cases. In other words, for a given number of new cases, the death rate seems to be declining. Possibly due to treatments getting better.
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Graphic 4: L.A. County population is over 10mil. 7,900 is a lot of people that have lost their lives (very sad, not intending to minimize this). That's around 0.00079 of the population.
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Graphic 5: According to the CDC, 94% of covid deaths had other co-morbidities listed, and of those, the average comorbidity was 2.6. If you dig into the CDC data, 92% of U.S. covid deaths have been people over 55 years old. I just feel like this is important for folks to know in determining personal risk. If you're very old with certain conditions, your risk could be very high. If you are very old but very healthy, your risk may actually be very low.
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Judge for yourself though, this is just my interpretation of the data...
I've always felt like we should focus on protecting the vulnerable, but letting the rest go on with life, and I think the "science" supports this.