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Looks to me like the article was published on February 28. In fact, according to the disclosure form, Fauci submitted it to the Journal on February 16.

BTW, here's the money passage:

On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%.4 In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Looks to me like the article was published on February 28. In fact, according to the disclosure form, Fauci submitted it to the Journal on February 16.

With this, that is ancient history. At that time the disease was mostly isolated to China, and figures on ratios of unknown cases weren’t yet available so people were pretty completely guessing.

“If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. “

“If one assumes...”
“If one assumes...”
“If one assumes...”

If one assumes things since proven to be wrong, yes, alternate conclusions are available.

So he didn’t actually say the fatality rate is like the flu, but merely posited that the unknowns of the time included that possibility - which we appear to have moved well beyond.