"hey it looks like the CFR/IFR is declining because we have better treatment methods" It's a claim not many are making because it's not clear it's really true.

"hey it looks like the CFR/IFR is declining because we have better treatment methods" It's a claim not many are making because it's not clear it's really true. Firstly, the bulk of the falling IFR is due to more widespread testing driving up numbers of known infections and sero-surveys indicating that even more people than that may have been infected. It's not primarily driven by better survival rates, although they did get better. At this point it seems clear that mass ventilation was a mistake. It was actually killing people rather than saving them because it's a last-ditch resort. COVID wasn't actually deadly enough to justify this and the large scale usage was driven more by the lack of reliable information, the somewhat unusual form of presenting pneumonia in early patients, the belief that it was an extremely deadly virus and the fact that ventilators force all air coming out of the patients lungs through high quality filters, so doctors are trained that ventilation stops infected patients pumping virus into hospitals. But doctors are smart and pretty quickly figured out that the ventilation was making things worse, that they couldn't keep the hospitals virus-free anyway, and at any rate they were about to run out of the machines so their hands were forced and they had to try something new. After that usage of ventilation went back to more normal policies, with supplemental oxygen being deemed sufficient for even quite extreme cases, because of course almost all cases need little or no hospital treatment. Meanwhile many drugs were tried and some were hailed as drugs that could help, e.g. remdesivir or hydroxychloroquine. But later on more controlled studies done under calmer conditions concluded they actually seemed to have no effect. Given this progress of events it's hard to argue that treatment methods actually got better, except in a very technical sense that most people wouldn't really mean. They got better in the sense that they returned to normal for this kind of virus and stopped making the situation worse. If there had been no mass panic at the start it's likely treatments would never have got so extreme to start with. the UK, as an example, currently already has about 30% of the cases in hospital versus the peak in late April, and about 15% of the deaths The UK has also quadrupled its testing rate since April. The numbers aren't directly comparable. without careful management it risks getting out of control I don't believe that's been proven at all. The analysis was done many times by now: every government intervention tried so far has no correlation with the course of the disease. That means attempts at management have failed and it has in fact been out of control the whole time, but, fortunately for us, our bodies are generally pretty good at fighting diseases except in the last years of our lives or when immunocompromised in some way, so that hasn't led to disaster.