That true as far as it goes.
But at no time in all of recorded history were the people who could only be proved to be infected by sophisticated laboratory procedures counted in the denominator.
For every epidemic EVER only people ill enough to seek medical care were counted as cases.
EVER!
If you want to feeeeel good about this pandemic, add as many people as you like to the denominator. Why stop at those who are sick? Why not add everyone who tests as exposed even if they never get sick? Why stop there? Why not put the population of the whole country in the denominator? After all, they might have been exposes! Hey! How about the entire population of the planet, don't they deserve to be counted???
That'll make the death ratio really low!
And really false, when compared to every disease that has ever swept through a population in the past, when those ignorant, benighted people only counted the overtly sick in their reckoning of how many died of the disease...
The tested sample of the 1918 flu was recovered from the Alaskan Brevig Mission, a tiny isolated Inuit settlement.
During the five-day period from November 15-20, 1918, the 1918 pandemic claimed the lives of 72 of the villages’ 80 adult inhabitants.
So my question is, was the recovered virus genome from the first generation? What's the best guess as to the properties of the second more deadly wave of a mutated virus?
I believe CDC’s ultimate flu numbers for every flu season are estimated as well. Why not for COVID-19?