We don't know the precise answer to that though there is a lot of evidence that the mortality rate is around 1%. My point is that you can't just extrapolate rates from the data we have.
Example - if 5 times the number of people are actually infected, should we just project 5 times as many deaths and hospitalizations? No. Of course not. The people that are infected but not tested are not dying or requiring hospitalization rates as the ones we know about. Because they are in the hospital, etc.
There are lots of unknowns here:
* Number of people truly infected - likely many more than we have tested
* Demographics of all these unknown people infected - it would be natural for them to skew young and healthy. While the overall mortality rate of the entire population might be lower, we also need to realize that older and sicker people are social distancing better than young people that think they are invincible.
* Mortality rates - NY has corrected some of this, but many people are dying at home that have never been tested or just dying in places that do not test all deaths. Deaths are probably underestimated by anywhere from 30% to 100% in some places. In the 2018-2019 flu season we estimated 34,000 deaths. We only counted 7,000 however. It is possible we already have had more than 100,000 COVID-19 deaths in this country. 200,000 may be around the lowest number we will get away with even with good social distancing. And that number would not include second wave infections in the Fall.
We have done a pretty good job bending the curve so hospitalizations don't overwhelm the system. We are close to that level in NY already though and probably in a dozen other cities. We have managed the ICU load pretty well, though with a herculean effort from health care workers and an unknown cost of deaths from people with other illnesses.
Those NY estimates are both good news and bad news. They are not good enough to think about relaxing the social distancing however. I think we are more likely in mid-May to early June for that to start. It will probably only be a 50% restart that will still require isolation from vulnerable groups. We'll get there. That NY data just not suggest we will get there any quicker however.
