Not convinced. I really think there is some wishful thinking involved here. When you have both Vo Italy and the Diamond Princess performing comprehensive testing on 6700 people (this is about as controlled an environment you are going to get for now), for the death rate to be anywhere near .1%, literally everyone on that ship and town would need to be positive for the virus. You would then need to conjure up 4000 more people from thin air and have them be positive as well. Considering, only about 800 tested positive out of the 6700 (and we are missing the 4000 imaginary people). That is a boatload of positive people that we are missing. The second article bases its research on China's numbers which we know are bogus.
This underestimation happened with SARS too. I think people just don't want to believe the facts in front of them (or want to put the most optimistic view forward). For any of these rates significantly below 1% we have to be missing absolute boatloads of positive people. We're talking millions and millions. Just in the United States, if no one else died, we are missing 216,000 people to get to 1%. To get to .1% we are missing about 3.9 million positive people. That is with a death rate of death/total positive cases and all active cases not dying. If we just look at resolved cases (assuming the unresolved cases are of similar severity and outcome to the resolved ones) we are missing 6.6 million positive people to get to 1% and 68 million positive cases to get to .1%.
Just think, in the press conference yesterday, the Administration was flooring 100000 deaths currently. For that to be .1% mortality rate we'd need about 100 million Americans positive. For their ceiling of 240000 we would need 240 million Americans positive.
We've done the death rate thing so many times. First of all, I think it's important to know why someone wants to discuss the death rate. Why is a particular death rate "important"? As an example, 1%? Who decided that 1% was an ok number and anything below that is good, and above that is bad? I have answers for that, but can't express them in this forum.
Models have their place, but they are just models. Cuomo had a great line on models today. He said that the frustrating thing about models is that they always change, and that's because we're always feeding new info into them.
As an example, the death rate numbers are HEAVILY dependent on Chinese data. South Korea and China are the only two countries that have seen the back side of this virus (on a large scale). If it turned out that China was lying and we have to toss out their numbers, who is the next hard-hit country to analyze? Italy? I sure hope not, because their death rate looks atrocious at the moment.
I'm going to steal Cuomo's line on facts. Facts are facts.
The facts are that the non-China death rate is currently 4.9%. In Italy it's almost 12%. Yes, we know that there are a large number of cases that are likely not being counted. But on the other hand, of all active cases, there are still a lot of people who unfortunately haven't died yet. Death rates will always rise at the end of an outbreak. (see South Korea who had always been way below 1%, and as they've virtually eliminated new cases, they've seen their death rate rise to 2%)
In the end, the final death rate will end up being lower than it is. By how much, who really knows or cares? But using a "fantasy" death rate to try and prove why this virus is no big deal is an argument that I won't entertain any longer.
One last thing on Vo. Yeah they did have a bunch of asymptomatic cases (at the time the study was done, we still don't know how many of those eventually became symptomatic), but even so they had 1 death among 89 people, so a CFR higher than 1%.
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