Of course Occam's razor isn't right, but - do you really think it's even slightly likely that everyone in the infectious disease community messed up and didn't realize this was actually 10x
less deadly than the flu?
By the CDC's estimate you posted this year's seasonal flu has a infection fatality rate of around 0.06% and a hospitalization rate of around 1%. That's based on total infections. They usually estimate that about 50% of people seek medical attention for the flu, so we can assume that the observed rates are around two times that, right? So let's say the observed rate is 2% hospitalization and 0.12% fatal.
Right now in the US
according to the CDC (no funny China data!) the overall hospitalization percentage is 20-30%, with 5-11% requiring ICU admission, and case fatality 1.8-3.4%.
This disease is - so far - 10 times as severe when comparing (rough) observed cases to observed cases. That's apples to apples to apples, or as near as we can get.
Quote:
Of those hospitalized for flu this season, 5.9% are now dead.Perhaps many dropped dead outside a hospital, but it seems reasonable to use those two numbers together. Where's the panic? The flu is clearly a highly contagious disease if their prediction that more than 10% of Americans have had it this flu season.
The range for death to hospitalization for COVID19, using CDC's same numbers linked above, was 5-17% of hospitalizations end in fatality. Not sure why that's more or less relevant than overall CFR.
Are we really going back to "just the flu"??