Hopefully the US rate will be lower than elsewhere, my speculation is here it’ll be somewhere between 1 to 2 percent.
I’ve said for long time that once widespread testing results begin coming in the death rate is going to fall way way below 1%, with widespread disappointment and unhappiness.
My guess is going to be lower than that because we never got the huge spike of initial infections like what happened in Japan and South Korea, thanks to strict bans of people coming in from China at the beginning of February 2020. And definitely not the cultural factors that contributed to its fast spread in Iran and Italy. My guess is 0.3%, mostly anyone over 70 and/or afflicted with a pulmonary disease.
Numbers from South Korea seem to indicate somewhere between 0.5 and 1%. Most probably we’ll end up there. That is much higher than the flu and cause for concern. But not these crazy panic numbers.
Figures presented as death rates seem to be ratios of dead to reported cases. More accurate would be deaths to recoveries and will not be known until the WuHanFlu has run its course. Even then it won’t include mild cases which never even get reported and are apparently more numerous than the hospitalizations. Many people get a mild dose and just stay home for a while.
unfortunately unless they really start testing everyone, only the really sick will be tested and that will skew the numbers higher. I actually think a ton of people tested helps because yes the affected number will go up but the severe reported cases will go down as far as percentages.
I think that would actually help calm people
I am going with the South Korean numbers (massive testing program...7,755 cases, 60 fatalities, 288 recovered so far) resulting in a “for now” death rate of 0.77%. So if COVID-19 gets to 35 million cases in the USA like an average flu year (highly unlikely this flu season/year) then potential US fatalities from COVID-19 are 269,000. But by next year we should have a vaccine (or 2 or 3). So for me COVID-19 is “a bad flu causing a lot of pneumonia esp. in older folks, am going to practice social distancing & lots of hand washing”.