It's probably too late to be noticed, but I feel compelled to say that I think you are wrong here. I've read enough of Ioannidis' work (and that of other statisticians) to know that this is just an example of how the math would work out if those assumptions were true. Later in the piece, he uses the different numbers of 60% infection with a 1% death rate. Neither is a projection, or a claim that the assumptions are true.
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.