Using the numbers on the Johns Hopkins website, the US mortality rate is about 2%, or roughly 20 times higher than the average flu. But because of the lack of testing, we really don't know how many uncounted cases there are. I still don't understand the lack of a scientific sampling, which could be done in a few days with a high level of confidence in the result.
John and others, IMO it has been a massive failure of both technology and imagination to not have been able to scale up massive diagnostic testing. We still don't have an approved serological (blood) test (I did see an Internet hoax yesterday that several news organization who should have known better bit on and published) that can be quickly deployed. Here is what I wrote in my daily email brief today:
I’m a big fan of podcasts and listen to them when I’m out walking, in my car, or working out. I may have already mentioned that Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard, has a very good one called ‘Deep Background’
https://pushkin.fm/deep-background (all of his podcasts are at the link). Yesterday, he had a conversation with Nobel Laureate in Economics Paul Romer and the discussion moved quickly to massive testing of the US population beyond what is being done right now. Romer, as we all do, wants to get people back to work and massive testing to find those who have not had SARS-CoV-2 or had it and have recovered would help solve this problem. There are obvious issues such as drastically ramping up test kits and keeping track of those who test negative, but in this day of big data and even bigger projects, this strikes me as the key one to undertake. Romer argued the point well and it’s worth a half hour to listen to it.
Yes, it's a massive project but better than sitting on our thumbs. So many failures.