>>If you go to older than 65 the numbers are 17% of the population account for 58% of the cases and 100% of the deaths.

OK, here's some more math out there:

- WHO was quoting a 3.4% COVID-19 mortality rate as recently as yesterday.

- South Korea which has high testing thanks to wide availability of a testing model the US largely lacks, reports 0.6-0.84% mortality this week. I will dig out some stats for comparison to South Korean flu mortality.

- Current US COVID-19 mortality is 2.8% based on small sample size so far.

- CDC has postulated 1% mortality which still is much more lethal than flu in the US, as Victor had suggested a while back.

- Congress in-house MD Monahan says 70-150 million people in the US will contract COVID-19.

- If the mortality rate is 1%, that means 700,000 to 1.5 million people in the US will die of COVID-19.

- Meta-data analysis by other epidemiologists and based on mortality comparisons with other outbreaks in similar early stages, yields mortality as low as 0.05% or up to 2%.

- Important to note that when experts use the CDC figure, they are not necessarily supporting or agreeing to it - they're saying that if this is the best number we have, we need to base planning around it. FWIW, Fauci recently wrote that mortality may be well under 1% - but it's not scientific to run with that, he needs to use the CDC number and rely on CDC keeping that number in shape. Nor is it scientific to point to the sharp decline in Chinese numbers and expect the same for the US. Planning is about preparing for the worst, not hoping for the best.

Of note is that COVID-19 probably should have SARS-2 in its jargon label, since that's what it is. The SARS-1 variant had far lower infection rate but 10% mortality, so this one certainly behaves more like flu than like its earlier sibling.