Where are we at?
The current case load of 169,000 is light. I don't think anyone doubts that.
By far the most accurate guides to what's really going on are South Korea and the Diamond Princess. The ship gives perfect information, because not only is a known and finite number of cases, it skews towards the aged as well.
Diamond Princess has a current death total at 7, almost a perfect 1%, and 15 patients still listed at serious. The serious cases have been dropping and the deaths haven't been rising, and even if all that 15 died - which I'm sure they won't - it would give a death rate of 3%.
From that, we can be fairly sure the death rate anywhere won't be worse, aside from possible treatment bottlenecks causing higher than necessary deaths.
On to South Korea. They have tested 300,000 people, have instigated strict quarantine and isolation rules and they have shut the disease down. New cases are running at less than 1% growth for the past two days. Their mortality rate looks quite steady at around 1% of cases.
It's pretty bloody obvious to me that we should all be following SK, but none of us are.
Assuming 60% of the population gets it, I think we're looking at a population-wide base mortality figure of 0.6%, rising to around 0.8 due to overcrowding and many countries where care may not be as good as some developed countries will hopefully have.
That's 60,000,000 deaths worldwide.
I think it's probably worth trying to avoid that scenario.
Whether we can or not remains to be seen, because it's too late for most places to act in the way SK has. The best most of us can hope for is to repeat China's position - shutting the gate after it's bolted, but managing it anyway, albeit at enormous economic cost.
