“Things appear deceptively dire if we calculate death rate solely by reference to reported COVID-19 cases; but the picture is deceptively benign if we measure deaths against an inflated conjecture about the non-reporting population.
“I suspect that this explains the ostensible contradiction between Dr. Fauci’s two comments on the fatality rate. Context is everything. In his House testimony, Fauci was confronting a political narrative that COVID-19 is really no worse than flu, and reliance on reported cases showing a 10:1 difference was a useful rebuttal. In his essay, he was trying to demonstrate to other scientists (and whatever sliver of the public reads medical journals) the imprecision of our knowledge about exactly how much worse COVID-19 is than flu.”
- https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-fatality-rate-computing-difficult
His February Essay matched his public comments at the time. Not much was known yet and they obviously didn’t trust information coming out of china. And I think they were also trying to placate the public. Something the public doesn’t need nor appreciates.
By March 11, They had better data out of non China countries, and they realized that this really was 10 times worse than the flu. And that was reflected in Dr. Fouci’s comments. And he even framed those comments of :ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu” as a way for Americans to get their heads around this.