>>>I see that CDC's latest conservative estimate of COVID mortality is .26% of infections, order/s of magnitude less than modeled lethality.
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>>>I say "conservative" because it's based on 25% asymptomatic cases, unlike the up to 86% asymptomatic calculation from elsewhere. Increase the denominator by 350% and mortality drops to less than annual flu.
>>>
>>>Until better asymptomatic spread can be measured by community testing, .26% remains more than twice as high as annual flu lethality, but less than pandemic flu lethality. Meanwhile the main message is that models can by shockingly inaccurate so politicians need to be discouraged from ever again treating models as settled science.
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>>John
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>>whats your "ideal world" view on how this should have been handled (ignoring initially stopping it in Wuhan).
>
>For the US - as soon as Italy released the fact that the average age of those dying from COVID-19 was 81 years lock down all long term care facilities, Concentrate the limited testing available to those facilities including staff. If you are older than 55 follow the lead of the residents of The Villages, Florida ( median age 71, population 122,000, population density > 3000/sq mile) - 1 death from COVID -19. If you are younger than 55 keep doing what you were doing before COVID-19 - your chance of being hospitalized (at least in Florida) so far is about 2800/11,500,000 and you chance of dying is 143/11,500,000.Build up the "herd immunity", if there is such a thing. BTW Florida averages over 300 deaths per week from H1N1.

When the average age of COVID fatalities in Italy was 81, the total number of deaths was less than 200.
For the US - the numbers are a lot different in NY than in FL.
I agree with you that a more targeted approach would have been better, but there was one missing ingredient for collecting data: extensive testing. And contact tracing, but that would be almost impossible in the US, where people (who otherwise would have nothing to hide) are concerned about the government invading their privacy. I know this because I read their posts everyday on FB :)
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