Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

"It's different this time" is possibly the scariest phrase in human history.

True lol. We’ve been doing that ourselves consistently over the last 30 years.

The "daily new cases" data is pretty irrelevant,at least here in the USA.

I believe we're currently testing into a much, much larger population of already existing infections.  Basically all an increasing rate on "confirmed cases" tells us, is that our testing is increasing overall.  The exponential growth we're seeing is an artifact of increasing testing rates around the country, as more and more testing facilities come online and tests are more widely available around the country.

So for me, the only real statistic worth tracking, is death rate.  When that begins flattening out, we'll know we're getting somewhere.  The rate of increase (or even decrease) of "confirmed cases" is meaningless if it doesn't correlate to the deltas in the death rate.

A desperate authoritarian backed into a corner? They might not care.

Agreed. And one aspect of the modulation of the case rate, where we go from strongly exponential to much more weakly exponential, appears to be limits in NY. They've been only testing ~20K cases per day over the last week+, which suggests that their case rate can't go strongly exponential if their test capability isn't ramping exponentially. I think a lot of the exponential areas are other parts of the country where they're ramping testing rates.

Death rates are somewhat noisy when the numbers are small, but I think we've moved well beyond that. So I agree that it's more important now to be looking at death rates rather than confirmed cases.

For sure, the noise in the system is diminishing, and the real data is beginning to roll in.

I'll just add a blanket "Unfortunately" to all of this because while I discuss the analytics dispassionately, I understand the deaths are all real people and loved ones.  Some of us are going to lose someone we know, probably well, and it's really possible we'll lose loved ones.  That all sucks really really badly.

And I suspect that, sooner rather than later, we as a nation are going to have to make a decision that might further jeopardize those loves ones in the most at-risk groups.  But realistically, this nation isn't built for prolonged periods of inactivity.  It's going to get wild, and dangerous, if we don't relieve the pressure, likely sooner than we'd prefer.