Damn it otto, you are being stubborn! 5% death rate of coronavirus would kill millions in the U.S. You cannot look at death rate per confirmed cases.
Deaths rate means deaths from CV divided by the
% of total infections in a population. How do you know the total infections in a population?
Total positive CV tests mean nothing since they test only a small segment of the population, and they are heavily biased towards symptomatic people and healthcare workers (which is good). And tests only tell if someone is active with CV, not if they have recovered. We also know there are many, many asymptomatic people that have/had CV and didn’t know it, or didn’t have much in the way of symptoms, thus never tested.
So the only way to find out the deaths rate is to know how many people have been infected. This can be done with antibody testing. These tests are not perfect but have a small error rate which seems to balance between positive and negative false readings.
New York State conducted cross-state antibody testing that showed 14.9% of the population had COVID at one time. This represents 2.7 million had COVID-19 instead of the 250,000 confirmed positive cases. This translates to an actual death rate of 0.5%. Very bad but not the 2-4% repeated in the media to this day.
But NYC is one of the hardest hit areas in the world, high population density and some hospitals overrun. 0.5% death rate should be the high water mark for the U.S.
Then the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine conducted the first truly randomized CV antibody data collection and found a coronavirus death rate of 0.18% in heavily populated Miami Dade County, from an extrapolated 165,000 positive cases and 295 deaths. IMO, this should be more representative on the country. Note the media reported about the results but never mentioned the 0.18% death rate, which was all that mattered.
We could compare this 0.18% death rate to the flu rate of 0.10%, but the comparisons stop there. Coronavirus has no vaccine and is more contagious and asymptomatic, which is why we have a pandemic.
1 in 5 New Yorkers May Have Had Covid-19, Antibody Tests Suggest
Asymptomatic: People who tested positive showed no symptoms - CNN