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Comment by Grim-444 | Hacker News Reader

35 million people in the US have tested positive with Covid. Additional millions likely had it and weren't tested. What percentage of those tens of millions that caught Covid do you believe would up in the ICU versus having light flu symptoms, or no symptoms at all?

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The CDC has estimates for the data you asked for here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

In the USA, by March 2021, there were 114.6 million estimated total infections, 5.6 million estimated hospitalizations, and 17.5 million estimated asymptomatic infections.

That predicts approximately 1 in 3 Americans were infected with the virus. These numbers make sense to me, and I can show this with back of the napkin math. A few global studies estimated the average infection fatality rate to be between 0.4-0.7%. Using a 0.6% death rate and the reported 600k deaths in the USA, that gives 600,000 / 0.6% = ~100 million infected in the USA. So the CDC numbers look alright.

People are downvoting you because you’re saying something in bad faith, knowing full well you can just punch into Google and go down this specific thread of argument all you want. But to keep this on topic, being on the “don’t deal with it” side of a public health crisis is a great example of the limits of contrarianism - it’s always bad faith to be a contrarian in that context, but not all contexts. So you do you!

Why are you assuming he's saying it in bad faith? How is pointing out actual facts being a contrarian?

Indeed, contrarian to what, exactly?

Telling that you're being downvoted by HN community for asking a legitimate question.

If 600k Americans died (that was the likely understated number back in Juneish?) then the death rate is way above 1%.

So yeah, a lot. Go google "2021 life expentancy us" and see.the shithole.we are in, even if a lot of other dearh causes went down (like driving)

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