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.
And the point of that comment is what?
I'm looking for a bright side to this and with more immune because they were asymptomatic, that would indicate greater progress in the herd immunity than we currently are aware of.
That would be encouraging.