This is precisely the reason the media are focusing on number of cases, to distort the threat. Because the number of deaths are dropping, in terms of the number of cases, the latter is no longer an indicator of the former, but that mental image of higher deaths:cases ratios from early in the pandemic is maintained in media panic. This is done for social control, not so much medical reasons.
Exactly. Florida has similar case counts, but much lower deaths in proportion to cases. Reality is that the virus was sweeping New York for weeks, infecting millions, before Cuomo and de Blasio even acknowledged it had gotten out of New Rochelle. Much of tail end of the bad flu season was likely coronavirus.
The death rate was never 8%. The reason it looked like it was 8% or higher was because so many cases were being missed, and they could test a dead body (or take any pneumonia case and list it as a probable COVID death) more readily than the litany of living cases. Among cases with symptoms, the fatality rate is 2-3%... but most cases, we're now finding, have no symptoms at all, and the fatality rate is closer to 1%.
The real issue here are the alleged cases with no symptoms (over 40% of all cases) and who never spread it to anyone else (80% of all cases). We only have two tools to prove an infection: PCR test and antibody test, and the antibody test is fraught with errors so they automatically assume it's wrong if it comes back negative. If there's a false positive, nobody would be able to tell.