Covid-2019

It's taken us two weeks to get around to cleaning the dirty datasets from the virus modelers in Washington. Now it can be told! With their Sept. 18 update, they downgraded fatalities by year-end by 37,000, and now with last week's update by another 7,000. Funny how when their updates are optimistic, their spreadsheets suddenly get difficult for the public to read. 

Cases are making new highs in major European nations, while the summer flareup in the US sunbelt has completely passed. The political narrative has been that Europe "did it right," and outperformed the US. Now the tables have turned, and anxious global markets wait to see if European authorities make the lethal error of locking down again. We are betting they won't. 

Europe debates new lockdowns, facing a second wave with lots of cases but few fatalities. We don't think they will do much. The critical reading -- days-to-double fatalities -- isn't budging in hotspots France, Spain or the UK.

The media is focused on the imminent attainment of 200,000 US fatalities. But it should be remembered that the world case fatality rate has more than halved from a peak of 7.2% in late April to 3.1% today -- and falling every day. This is a cumulative calculation, so the instantaneous fatality rate (which is impossible to calculate directly) must be even lower than 3.1%.