There is no vaccine or cure. May never be either. President Trump's talk of things getting before right after the election is just a CON-JOB. The mortality rate so far in the USA is 6% of those infected. Might more testing find more cases and reduce the mortality rate calculation? Yes. Meanwhile, 6% of 330 million Americans is 19.8 million DEAD - many dying in expensive ICUs in excruciating pain and alone. And how many survivors are left disabled or vulnerable to other issues? A bit early to celebrate, I'd suggest.

Gary, those numbers you cite are way off. What we want to look at is the IFR (infection fatality rate). How many of infected people die? It turns out the number is between 0.2% on the low end to about 0.7% on the high end, sucks, but not the apocalypse. Furthermore, people under 40 without other health issues basically die at a rate of zero, it's the rest of us who are in increasing danger due to age and age related problems. Read about the 1969 flu pandemic, for example, it was as bad as covid 19 and the world moved on. Here is some hard data from Italy, for example, who's had a worse time of it than others due to a generally older society. Their IFR (PFR they call it) is 0.58%, 1/10 of what you claim. Web Link

I'm glad to hear our economy is starting to open up, if even a little bit. Some of us have the luxury of working from home in our nice white collar jobs, but some people have no such choice and are really hurting right now. The stress of joblessness and impending destitution kill too, and it's what we've forced on a large part of society.

The number of confirmed cases in America is 1.5 million. 90,000 deaths. Simple math. You cite no evidence that the number of infected Americans is higher

Right, nobody knows the actual number, it's a guess. We have 1.5 million confirmed infected, but far many more unconfirmed infected or asymptomatic, you can't just take a fraction of a partial denominator.

Stanford updated their prevalence study recently; Web Link

What is says that in santa clara county, with 95% confidence, 50x as many people are infected as are confirmed sick with covid-19. You can't extrapolate that to the US, but if you did, you would have 90,000 / 75 million = 0.12% IFR. The number is different in different parts of the country, and best guess I've seen it's about 20x nationally, so 90,000 / 30 million = IFR of 0.3%.

There's no need to make this thing scarier than it is, it's bad enough, and using scary numbers doesn't help. We have antibody studies happening all over the country to figure out how many people are actually infected, not how many are showing up at the hospital, which is the sickest of the sick.

Marcin, not that I expect a dogmatic libertarian to respond to reason, but that Stanford study has been pretty thoroughly debunked. See this discussion for earlier analysis: Web Link

Considering they rushed to the press to oppose any restrictions with basic statistical errors in their study (let alone one of the primary researcher's wives recruiting study participants from her elementary school with misleading information), a rational observer should take their study with a grain of salt at best. Note that even with all of this, they haven't released any of their data. Bad science, further demonstrated by the recent revelations that they were funded by and in correspondence with anti-restriction activists.

Let's assume that the Stanford study you cite is valid and reveals that most people exposed to the virus so as to produce antibodies do not come down with the disease. That is good news BUT it appears most disease victims were subjected to exposure to a higher virus load. That would explain why the disease appears throughout families and in other group settings. People exposed a little and testing positive for some antibodies could still be subject to the disease when exposed to more of the virus. Among confirmed cases of the disease, 6% have died.

The death rate is up since COVID-19 AND the rate is higher than the number of COVID-19 cases alone. Meaning that COVID-19 is NOT simply an upper respiratory disease.

Many more people have died due to complications of COVID-19 that have NOT been tested.

We simply do NOT know everything about COVID-19.

I will bet a nice home in Silicon Valley that they will find COVID-19 related deaths prior to the current earliest known death in February. The virus was in Wuhan in October 2019 (and probably earlier). How many flights from October to February do think there was in the SF Bay Area from Wuhan/China???

@libertarians:

What does believing in smaller government have to do with the studies? The Stanford paper I posted is to their revised paper, post-ridicule, and having gone through some amount of peer review. It's not been refuted, but they've tightened up their numbers and they're closer in line with the other cities. Boston just reported results from a similar study: Web Link Boston is seeing 0.67% IFR, a far cry from 5%.

It's not productive to dismiss some study as being an example of ideology or something - they have to stand on their own under peer review, and there are a dozen studies confirming numbers in line with Stanford's in multiple cities, like the one I just posted from Boston.

You can't pick and choose results when it comes to these kinds of things. You can, for example, point to a study in a different city which shows that numbers in Santa Clara are out of whack, or show that they are anomalous compared to other studies, but that simply is not the case. We have one outlier, NYC, and all the other studies are consistent with each other.