So the good news, and we can use some, is death rates in the apparent wave are down everywhere in Europe. All the countries getting a severe bounceback in cases are seeing far less deaths. Now this could be a temporal effect that some of those cases have not run their course yet, but it seems what is circulating is resulting in far less deaths. Globally this is a consistent pattern in countries that are seeing this wave a 2nd time. Even in Canada we are looking at around 30 deaths per day nationally on average and at peak of first wave we were looking at around 170 deaths per day.
US also with far less daily deaths than they were seeing at peak. Around 650 now compared to peak average of around 22oo. This is very significant pattern. Again the pattern is any country in a 2nd wave is seeing profoundly reduced deaths. This in count numbers and in rate per cases or rate per population.
Countries seeing this the first time are not following this pattern.
From a layman pov what this suggests is areas that have been exposed to this virus since last winter or spring have possibly some developing immunity to dying from this. I mean in time it gets in everything. Deactivated cells are in our sewage run off, water supply, air, probably our food chain by now. Exposure to deactivated virii is known to produce some immunity and indeed is what a lot of vaccines are historically composed of.
Now the uncertain part is whether Edmonton area really had enough exposure in first wave to even really have that effect here. In other words Edmonton is going through either a first or second wave now. But optimistically the Canadian death rates now from covid suggest we are in the less lethal 2nd stage of this pandemic. The numbers over the next week or two will tell us a lot.
