This article isn't trying to downplay the fatality rate and isn't trying to justify letting people die for the sake of the economy/business. This article is po

This article isn't trying to downplay the fatality rate and isn't trying to justify letting people die for the sake of the economy/business. This article is pointing out that the fatality rate may be rather low and that nationwide quarantining may not be that useful in saving lives, instead we may need to focus on supporting hospitals and the elderly in other ways than mass quarantining. They make some good points: >First, the test used to identify cases doesn’t catch people who were infected and recovered. Second, testing rates were woefully low for a long time and typically reserved for the severely ill. Together, these facts imply that the confirmed cases are likely orders of magnitude less than the true number of infections. Epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for these factors. There is a lot of work being done here and there are already antibody tests being used in research so I'm expecting to see some better modeling soon. They also make some less good points: >An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. I get the feeling that everyone who came from Wuhan to the US was incredibly aware of the state of their health and were ready to quarantine at the slightest snivel. At least the ones I knew were. It could very well be that the Jan. 15 case was the first or very close to the first to show symptoms. Also, the doubling rate of every 3 days is less accurate for the first several days of the disease which probably messes up this estimate even more. What I guess I'm getting at is that this is a messy back of the envelope calculation that is less useful than it is foolish.