>If it were well below 1%, it would be a nothing-burger, No, it wouldn't. The other important value is the reproduction rate of the virus. If that value is hig

>If it were well below 1%, it would be a nothing-burger, No, it wouldn't. The other important value is the reproduction rate of the virus. If that value is high, then our healthcare system is going to be overwhelmed just through the sheer number of people that will be infected. So yes, it is looking like the infection fatality rate is well below 1% (as suggested by preliminary studies from NYC, Cali, Germany, and the Netherlands), but because the reproduction rate is so high, and the fact we have no herd immunity, still means thousands (or hundreds of thousands of people) will end up in the ICU. This seems like what happened in NYC and Italy. There was a massive spike in untracked infections in Feb/March. The vast majority of those people cleared the infection, but the tiny percentage of people who had complications, still overwhelmed the availability of ICU beds.