Dumaguete has zero covid for a month now

It never was the case that everybody who got it died from the beginning. China developed tests and tested everyone on a mass scale along the spread route. Plenty of people had no symptoms, or mild symptoms and they had a CFR of 3.5%. They published maps of the virus spread. A Malay Doctor friend looked at them chose one map distant from the epicenter as representative of the IFR and it was .32%. I had no idea. The CDC calculation now is .65% for the IFR, probably using 40% of infections as asymptomatic. The virus hasn't weakened, it morphed in Europe, got more spikes, and became more transmissible, but not more lethal... so far. Our luck seems to be that we are less densely populated, plus luck. Bacolod and IloIlo have breakouts, but are also cities with 400,000 plus, and have dense poor areas. There also is speculation that maybe Filipinos have been exposed to more and have some cross immunity. Who knows? The Manila area has an 85% mild symptom rate, the Cebu area has 90-95% asymptomatic, with no explanation for the difference. A large study in India just found 5% of the cases produce 80% of the infections, and children are definitely carriers, but tend to infect other kids. I think we've had effective contact tracing, and missed contacts don't infect, the RO falls below one, and transmission stops. But that's a guess. I'll take luck any day.

 

The problem with this pandemic is there are way too many unknowns. Here's what I think is the stuff we do know.
We know that viruses mutate and that this one has done so also. We don't know for sure whether some of the mutated strains are more transmissible (although that seems likely). Less lethal strains have a better chance to spread, for obvious reasons.
We know that more recently far less infected people end up in intensive care or on intubators (probably because of better treatment in the early stages and/or because vulnerable people are generally being more careful).
We know that once patients do get intubated their chances are not good, and that in these cases especially being above 70 and/or obese poses a big risk.
We also know that even in places where it seemed the situation was "under control" earlier, the virus has re-emerged and second waves of infection have occurred or are underway. Example: Iceland had one of the worst early outbreaks, but got things under control by early May. Then until mid July, so for 2 1/2 months, they had very very few new cases. Since then they've been struggling with a second wave, not quite as bad as the first, but still.
Why? We don't know.
We know that relaxing rules too soon (or people getting complacent) is a recipe for disaster. Israel is an example of that (with really bad results). They relaxed rules in May already, and now have the worst rate of new infections of all countries (close to 0.5% of the population in the last week only).

 

not so