Why Did Covid Cause Thousands of Deaths in Spring 2020 Even Though it Had Been Hanging Around All Winter?

 There is now no shortage of evidence that the coronavirus had begun spreading undetected all over the world by autumn 2019 at the latest. However, the 2019-20 flu season was mild in most places, despite the fact that the pandemic began in autumn 2019.

Why did COVID-19 only start killing lots of people come spring 2020 if it had been hanging around quietly all winter?

• Some sceptics argue that it's because Covid isn't really a more severe virus than flu, but the excess deaths were all caused by how we started responding to it in February and March 2020
• The overuse of ventilators in New York City and the surrounding states in the first wave has been suggested to account for tens of thousands of additional deaths
• However, while a ventilator panic in and around NYC will explain some of the additional deaths that spring, it wouldn't explain the deadly outbreaks elsewhere, or the deadly outbreak that kept coming in subsequent waves even as the use was scaled back

The main driver of COVID deaths appears to be COVID-19, a disease caused by a virus which Dr. John Ioannidis has estimated from antibody surveys to have an infection fatality rate (IFR) of around 0.3-0.4% in Europe and the Americas.

• This rate varies between and within countries and over time, and some of that variation will be due to poor treatment protocols.

Winter 2019-20 was an ordinary winter, despite SARS-CoV-2 lurking and circulating incognito

• It moved around at a low level alongside other viruses, infecting some people but not in huge numbers.
• If a virus with an overall IFR of around 0.3% was spreading throughout the winter, why were deaths so low until March and April?
• The main reason for the lack of deaths was not spread, particularly in care homes
• Why did the virus suddenly become much more infectious in February 2020? Why did it go from circulating at a lower level alongside flu and other viruses to displacing them and infecting a large proportion of the population in a space of weeks?

The virus still keeps its secrets

• The question of why a virus circulating over the winter at a low level suddenly started spreading fast and wide and causing successive waves of deaths is not yet resolved

https://brownstone.org/articles/why-did-covid-cause-thousands-of-deaths-in-spring-2020-even-though-it-had-been-hanging-around-all-winter/