The steep decline in new cases has flattened to a more gradual decline over the last three weeks, but deaths have continued a steeper decline.
It might be an effect of the general lag time between new cases, and their resulting deaths.
But it might also (hopefully) be an effect of the more vulnerable being vaccinated (reducing deaths), while new cases continue to spread natural immunity among less vulnerable, still unvaccinated, segments of the population.
Time will tell - just speculating.
Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it is a pretty good bet that the most vulnerable population now being mostly vaccinated is responsible for the decline.
BTW, we’d discussed Brazil briefly, a couple days ago. I noticed Italy is a mess, too...
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
More lockdowns announced:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/13/europe/italy-coronavirus-national-lockdown-intl/index.html
I do think, with regard to the CNN article I linked to, that some of the statements regarding new variants will turn out to be overblown. OTOH, I also suspect that “natural immunity” to COVID through prior infection will eventually turn out to be not much better than “natural immunity” to colds through prior infection.
The steep decline from the holidays wave is over. We’re returning to a baseline of new infections. Based on previous trends, we should expect the 7-day moving average to bottom out around 48,000-50,000 new cases per day. We may see a final small wave of new cases in April or May, but I don’t think it’ll be significant and I don’t think we’ll see a sizable increase in deaths thanks to the most vulnerable being vaccinated.
The continued decline in deaths is encouraging. On a 14-day lag, that decline should have plateaued 2-3 days ago. Hopefully it continues to decline. Looking at previous trends, I could see it declining into a new baseline of around 700-800 per day. If it drops significantly below that (e.g. <500), that’s very likely an impact of the vaccines beginning to show up in the data.
Either way, these are encouraging numbers. My math still puts us being done with this mess in July. That’s something to look forward to.