Let's not forgot the poorer countries that simply cannot sustain a lockdown for long periods, as it will kill more people than save. UN is now predicting 130 million starving due to the hit to the global economy.

Source: https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1062272

For people who don't die it's still not a cakewalk, people describe it as the worst thing they've ever had and others barely even know they've had it.

The problem was never the death rate alone. It was the death rate plus the high infection rate that was problematic. Even a low rate of .3-1 (which was always the estimated rate iirc) is going to kill a lot of people given how infectious COVID-19 has shown to be.

Not sure why you were downvoted as your statement that an IFR of 0.3 to 1 was always about the expected rate is completely right. E.g. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 published by Dr. Fauci and Dr Redfield on February 29.

Weirdly I’ve seen a lot of attempted history rewriting, I guess by people who in March didn’t understand the medical literature and confused CFR with IFR.

> Not a surprise, COVID19 is pretty soft compared to the historic pandemics.

Well, it isn't done and I'd say in terms of raw deaths it's pretty significant. Particularly when you recognize that a lot of those previous bad pandemics coincided with terrible water/sewage and insufficient healthcare.

> I gave the lockdowns 4 week

Interesting because the CDC and NIAID were signalling well in advance of that they wanted at least 8 weeks of shut-down.. Anyone with their ear to the ground(actually reading articles from and watching interviews of epidemiologists and health officials) would have known everything was going to be shutdown well into May and that school was out for the summer. Marriott furloughed employees until end of June BEFORE the major March shutdowns.

Fascinating. This means China’s numbers were actually quite accurate.

No it doesn't

No, China initially said a bunch o' stuff like 3-5%

Not really, no. You can go back to medical journal articles from early march and see they were using Chinese and Korean data and predicted between 0.1-1% death rate per infection (IFR).

Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., H. Clifford Lane, M.D., and Robert R. Redfield, M.D. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

Published February 29, 2020

> On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%.4 In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2

"Predominantly" is doing a lot of work for you there.

Link to source? Current data on cdc is 1,920,904 cases and 109,901 deaths which is 5.7% (and it doesn't appear to be changing much). That's about 20 times higher than your figure of 0.3%.

Just to those who downvote - if someone poses a question or argument which you think is easily refuted, by downvoting or removing that question you remove the opportunity for anyone else with the same argument to learn something.

And maybe this is part of the problem with the whole covid discussion - labeling all these simple arguments from all sides as "wot a moron!" instead of presenting them clearly for people to learn from.

You're mixing up the case fatality rate with the infection fatality rate.

This is the amount of confirmed people that tested positive with Covid, not even including once that were discovered with anti-bodies. CDC has mathematical models to predict the actual death rate: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/05/fac...