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Metmom:

The reason I think that only a small percentage of the US has it (under 1%) is because these exponential curves are exactly what we would expect.

The numbers all tie together—cases/hospitalizations/ICU/deaths.

15% of cases are hospitalizations
5% of cases are ICU
2% of cases are deaths (with a bit of lag time)

These are close to the largest and best documented numbers we have, which are New York State numbers.

“We may be further along on the herd immunity than we realize, what with so many people being asymptomatic or hardly having any symptoms or that weird illness they had around Christmas before we knew what was hitting us that was in reality(likely)corona.”

I don’t think it was CCP-19. I recall having the described symptoms prior to or just after the Patient Zero Date November 17, or at least way too soon for it to have reached many Americans. Really, by December it would have had to spread to enough people that some made it to the USA, then propagated through the US population to the point where millions had experienced it in order for even the half dozen who claim here they probably had it to be right.

Testing will tell us how many have had it. Those numbers should be out soon as hardened fact rather than speculation. I don’t want to see a #MeToo Corona Virus thing get going that would cause even more grief and misery.

metmom, I posted this on another Freep thread but it is pertinent in response to your post.

Not. It also depends on how many people actually catch CV19. If 100 million Americans catch it and half of those show no symptoms and are never diagnosed with it, while a million die of it, that looks like a 2% death rate based on the diagnosed total, but is really only 1% if you count the likely 50 million who were never diagnosed because they never showed symptoms.
Now change the 100 million Americans to 200 million who catch it, but this time make the symptomless percentage 75% instead of 50%, while keeping the total number of known infected at 50 million and the total dead still at one million. The proportion of known infected to dead is still 2%. But the actual proportion of dead to total infected, both diagnosed with symptoms and undiagnosed without symptoms, goes down to 0.5% of the 200 million.
Either way one million die of CV19. Now tell the dead they should be happy because the death rate is lower if there are more Americans who got CV19 but never showed symptoms.
What counts is how many Americans will die or be crippled because of this d***ed Chinese Virus. We don't know because we don't know for sure what the proportion of asymptomatic to symptomatic victims is in America. We can't know unless close to the entire population of a statistically valid area is tested. That just won't happen in America because only people who volunteer can be tested.
Plus there is the detail that a really quick, as well as accurate, test for the Chinese Virus is required, and there aren't any yet. Only when such a test is widely available can we even think of determining what the ratio of asymptomatic to symptomatic victims is, and then that will have to be done in some foreign country. Israel and South Korea come to mind.
Right now there is only ONE known instance in which a possibly statistically valid test of everyone in a given area was performed, and that was of all the passengers and crew on the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in Japan last month. There were 305 known victims when all the untested remainder were tested, and that produced about another 400 asymptomatic victims. Since then some of the latter group have developed symptoms.
It seems safe to assume from the Diamond Princess example that there are probably at least as many asymptomatic victims of the Chinese Virus as there are victims who show symptoms. It might be more than that, but we won't know until there is both a really quick but accurate test, and it can be performed in a controlled experiment on a larger population sample. That is at least a month off, and perhaps two months off.