I'm not sure what you mean by this. Two months ago he estimated[1] that the total death count in the U.S. would be 10,000, and we're already 10x that.
[1]: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
> If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.
his own estimate is
> reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.
The Gamgelt study for example estimates IFR at 0.28%. he has recently published a meta review of those studies https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...
None of that commentary makes sense except under the assumption that the author thinks the U.S. death total will be 10,000ish, and would have been unnoticeable without the availability of PCR testing.
(which the groupthink here unfortunately encourages)
His actual belief, which he states several times in the piece is that we don't yet know how many people are going to be infected or what the death rate is, and that our priority should be gathering more information: "The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have."
Different people have different styles of argument. From what you say, presumably if you used the example that Ioannidis did, this would imply that you believed this estimate was correct. Others have different styles, and you should not assume that they are making an assumption just because they happen to use numbers for an example.