There may not be bodies to "hide" because the mortality rate is far lower than what is being reported right now.
This "The CFR is much lower!" thing is rapidly becoming a conspiracy-level fallacy... It's probably true that there are a bunch of unmeasured cases (a reasonable study yesterday guessed at a 6x undercount) and that the CFR is currently overstated because of sampling problems with test availability.
It is absolutely not possible that there were a million cases in Hubei in december. Not from this disease. Come on, folks.
The current numbers are the ones that don't add up. Even John Hopkins estimates up to 500k cases in the US at the moment.
Even counties with good, pervasive testing can’t test for how many people already had it and are carrying antibodies.
We are flying very blind here. Treat all numbers with a huge grain of salt.
We are making massive social and economic changes based on very unclear data. People are sitting at home with nothing to do but watch live streaming YouTube videos of “confirmed cases” on a map or looking at some website showing the same and freaking the fuck out. But it is all based on crap data.
We can “pause” our global economy for a short while (week or two) but any more than that is going to have massive issues. Those toilet paper memes are funny until you run out yourself. Not having baby wipes in stock isn’t very funny. People are going to start getting into physical violence in stores over that shit (if it hasn’t happened already). People are gonna relapse into addiction. People are going to mill themselves. Supply chains are going to fall apart.
We can’t make massive sweeping changes like this for very long without a solid understanding how how pervasive this virus is.
> The test kits in use in the U.S. described in the articles detect viral genetic material—RNA, in the case of coronaviruses—which can be infectious material or noninfectious fragments. Once the patient has recovered and the RNA has been cleared, the tests will be negative. If we’re trying to ascertain what proportion of the population has been infected and experienced asymptomatic, mild or more serious infections, such post-infection testing yields “false negatives.”
> Additional, essential information will need to come from “serological tests” that measure antibodies in blood, which will tell us whether a person has been recently infected with SARS-CoV-2 and recovered. (Note that antibodies take about 10-14 days from exposure to the virus to appear.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-antibody-testing-to-understa...
> The mortality rate is thought to be ≤2%, but precise numbers uncertain due to a lack of available serological testing.
https://www.hopkinsguides.com/hopkins/view/Johns_Hopkins_ABX...
I think we're looking for a different measure (IFR?) which is "how likely is it on average for someone in the population to die from this?". That's the number we don't know because we don't know the number of infected people.
What we do know is that in the places where the disease has gotten out of hand, the medical system becomes overloaded. That's the real, immediate, present problem and whether it's a problem or not doesn't depend on the CFR. Note that most of the existing hospitalized cases in Italy are _still_ on ventilation. So although they don't show up in the CFR, they're still taking up medical resources and some number of them will eventually not make it. (Source: watch the many videos on Youtube from the Drs working in the Red Zones).