Actually I stand by my original numbers: (Adjusted by Johns Hopkins)
1,240,513 Confirmed cases
74,852 Deaths Confirmed
That demonstrates a current mortality rate of 6%
One can argue all they want, so where is all that testing if anyone can get tested when they want?
It's been stated already, even at 1% that's 3,200,000 deaths if permitted to go unchecked.
The Spanish Flu is the closest parallel and that claimed about 675,000 Americans
They had 3 waves.
We will have at least several.
Gotta look at the numbers apples to apples, for the numbers to have meaning.
So yes, of those who got sick... went to the doctor... got confirmed as covid... and eventually died - that number is at least 6% (since many of those cases have not finished dying). In comparison, the number of people who go the common flu... went to the doctor... got confirmed as influenza... and eventually died - that number is 0.1%
There are absolutely millions of more people walking around with covid (and the flu every year) who never got tested, recovered fine, and whose survival isn't factored in the fatality rate at all. The only way to begin to know how many more people are out there who have already been infected with covid (or the flu) and survived is with an antibody blood test. And knowing the full range of virus spread, and the measured total infected, will give a truer more accurate fatality rate for the covid (or flu).
This NY study is pretty good. Did you read it? Any comment or criticism? Sure, eventually tests will be more widespread and available (if that is again a subtle political dig??) we are kind of in the middle of a global pandemic and economic meltdown right now.
But the best available data seems to put the true covid death rate between 1% - 0.5%. And yeah, that could spread across almost the entire country, but not 320 million. It would reach herd immunity levels long before that and stop on its own. Still big numbers, still bad.
I think its clear now that we can't use the lockdown approach long enough to ever outlast and get through the current situation. Even if we were in absolute total lockdown for all of April, May, June--- come July we would start right where we left off. Virus still out there, starting right where it left off. Only way to stop it is herd immunity or vaccine (with questionable safety and duration) and along the way employ all we learned about social distancing and hygeine, and maybe get better with treatments and new medicines.