I think that Holman Jenkins did a pretty good job of summarizing the situation with respect to COVID-19 in his most recent Wall Street Journal column:
Mr. Trump, at 74, is at higher risk for a bad outcome than a 30-year-old would be. But most 74-year-olds survive Covid and many never have debilitating symptoms. Our media are prone to hysteria, oversimplification and fetishizing random things—case-fatality rates, masks, etc. Reporters and editors have a distorted single-variable mentality. Covid is deadly in a small percentage of cases, currently estimated at between 0.1% and 0.41%, especially among older people in ill health. The major urgency always arose from too many cases happening at the same time and endangering our ability to provide care.
Presently, new cases of COVID-19 and new deaths due to the disease are declining in all of the most populous states. New York and New Jersey remain the states with the highest number of deaths per million population and it appears unlikely at this point that those positions will be challenged. The states with the largest number of cases of COVID-19 per million population are also those with the highest proportion of black, Hispanic, and Native American populations.
I think the pandemic is far from over. In one sense it will never be over since it’s quite likely that SARS-CoV-2 will remain endemic within the population. Physicians are treating the disease more effectively than they were six months ago and, indeed, it seems quite unlikely that COVID-19 will overwhelm the health care system. Here in Illinois about 8% ICU beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients while about 5% of hospital beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients with plenty of beds available. Individual locations could find their resources strained. That’s why a system that could provide resources where they’re most needed quickly would be nice but that’s not the system we have. The U. S. is second only to China, a country with three times our population, in the number of tests that have been conducted although many countries have conducted more tests relative to their population than either China or the U. S. The Faeroe Islands have conducted more than twice as many tests as we have relative to its population. I see a correlation between being a relatively small island and high percentage of tests administered more than anything else. I remain skeptical that the method we have used for testing and contact tracing will do anything whatever to reduce new cases or mortality.
Although I don’t believe the pandemic is over, I think there’s a good case to be made that the emergency is over. We’ll see what happens in the winter months.
” it seems quite unlikely that COVID-19 will overwhelm the health care system.”
I think that is largely true, except for the flu. The part of the system that was really being overwhelmed were the ICUs. We have gotten way better in keeping people out of the ICU so if NYC could do it over now for March and April with what we know now they would not have been in such a crisis mode. However, there may be the flu which doesnt kill tons of people on its own, but leads to superinfections that kill. We dont know how Covid will interact with the flu.
Steve