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Counterpoint. Countries are reporting higher death rates in even if you take out the deaths attributed to COVID-19. One possible explanation for this difference is people are dying from COVID-19 and not being counted as victims of the pandemic.

Financial Times has some reporting on this.

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Case in point, we will never really know and we should feel lucky that this wasn't catastrophic and we got away with our lack of preparedness.

I think the count of the number of countries that have got away this outbreak is much smaller than the number of countries still dealing with the outbreak.

I would also say many of these countries are just at the start of this process.

The are only a few ways a country can get over the virus:

1. Find a vaccine (which is still months/years away).

2. Impose very strict isolation rules (i.e. New Zealand)

3. Develop heard immunity (i.e. reach a point where 70+% of the population have been infected).

Everyone got off easy because the CFR is single digits, likely less than 1%.

I'm talking about a real epidemic, where one in 3-5 died, than things would be real bad.

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