Have you noticed that the number of deaths, which once were the number one concern, now are made very little of by the news reports?
The estimated* median latency between contracting COVID-19 and diagnosis is just under 11 days, with 99.9% of cases diagnosed being traced to between 3 and 24 days prior.
The median latency between the onset of COVID-19 symptoms and hospitalisation is just under 4 days.
The median latency from hospitalisation to fatality is about 17.5 days, with 99.9% of fatalities happening with a spread of 11 to 33 days. Older people tend to succumb more quickly than young people.
So, the spike now means a couple of things:
Transmissions were up in early to mid June, and what we're seeing now is the result of that. Which means that even with re-imposition of lockdown and mask orders things are likely to continue going up for a week or two.
Deaths lag detection/diagnosis by about 22 days. So the fatalities we're seeing now are from cases diagnosed in the first 10 days or so of June, and actually transmitted in late May or very early June. Meaning that deaths are strongly likely to start increasing from now, as its about three weeks since case numbers started to ramp up.
The ~600 to 700 deaths per day the US is seeing at present occurred when transmissions were at roughly 21,000 to 22,000 per day. Given that the latest 7 day moving average is around 45,000 to 47,000 cases per day, you could reasonably expect fatalities to double.
However, more young (under 35s) are catching COVID-19. This is both good - as they have much lower fatality rates than older people - and bad - as they tend to spend much longer in ICUs and on ventilators, tying up much needed resources.
So, with treatment getting better and better and a greater proportion of young people getting the virus, a 100% increase in transmissions isn't going to lead to a 100% increase in fatalities. However, there will most definitely by a spike and I'd not be surprised if daily fatalities aren't back up to more than 1000 per day come mid to late July.
*This is a hard one to estimate, as with a lot of cases their are multiple potential transmission vectors, and with other cases its almost impossible to identify any transmission vector.
