A friend of mine in public health mentioned to me that it's not uncommon for second waves of epidemics to be less deadly, since many of the people most vulnerable to the disease would have already passed away during the first wave.
This idea that the "Media" is this sinister entity trying to stop the spread of good news during a pandemic which the entire world has taken drastic steps to curtail yet which has still killed over 1.1 million people is just so silly.
The media optimizes for eyeballs and attention, and hence we see hysterical, inaccurate, and fear-based reporting. With all the noise they put it, it absolutely does crowds out facts showing that the virus is now likely less deadly than it was in the earlier phase of the pandemic.
It doesn’t “mean nothing”, it’s another data point. If you see test positivity rate remaining low but cases increasing - which we do in many areas with sufficient testing - then it does suggest more people are getting the virus.
You can also corroborate this by comparing it to new hospitalizations, which are also up.
“Deaths is the only relevant measure” - not sure where to start with this except to say that this is not at all what epidemiologists seem to think and I won’t address it further without some very dramatic reasoning and evidence.
” If you see test positivity rate remaining low but cases increasing - which we do in many areas with sufficient testing - then it does suggest more people are getting the virus.”
No, it suggests that you’re doing more testing, and finding more cases. Which, exactly as the OP said, is a metric that can be manipulated by doing more testing.
The whole reason we emphasize positivity rate is to try to compensate for the inherent bias in reporting raw case counts.
There have been far more cases than we have ever formally detected with testing. There’s plenty of room to increase that number by testing more people, but it will not affect hospitalizations or deaths -
which is exactly what we’re seeing.
Deaths are not an entirely useful measure to see how the pandemic is progressing because they are a lagging indicator.
Positive test rates measure what was happening about a week ago. Hospital admissions reflect activity a week or two before that, and deaths often get reported a month or more after the events that caused people to get infected.
You have to look at all the data to get an idea of what is happening.
There has been a slight uptick in weekly deaths, roughly on par with what was observed in the last week of September. Given the trend of the line and the delayed reporting from most states, it’s more accurate to say that deaths have flattened:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/