56 karma · joined September 30, 2016
They can but they (mostly) do not. And the best way to have a beneficial impact on environment in the current situation would be "simply" to reduce its numbers. Unfortunately that's not so easy.
I came to similar conclusion just looking at the openly available numbers: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
If you compare the number of serious cases to the number of total cases for different countries you'll get a 10x difference. Norway tests more thoroughly then the other countries, so it has a huge number of active cases. But from those only ~2% serious. There may be different reasons for such a discrepancy but I tend to agree with your conclusion that we have a lot of asymptomatic cases around, higher then estimated R0 and lower then estimated fatality.
This is exactly what the article says