Dispelling some recent talking points about death rates & experts
Please stop saying we locked down because we thought death rates were higher, and please stop whining about expert predictions.
Guys, I am very sorry to burst everyone's bubble but the WHO's 3.4% mortality rate was wrong before it was even published. This isn't a hindsight thing - it was wrong THEN, BEFORE the lockdowns.
At the time of publishing, South Korea, with some of the most expansive testing in the world, was reporting a death rate of ~0.53%.** Japan and Italy, with OLDER, more vulnerable populations, were reporting about 2.5% - and they were not known to have very widespread testing.
The WHO's numbers were mostly skewed by China, and even in China, it was basically only Wuhan at the time that was so high. Even ex-Wuhan China had a 0.7% death rate at the time.
So let me be super clear: when we decided to do lockdowns, etc., we KNEW that it wasn't a 3%+ death rate, more likely < 1.5% max, and advocated for lockdowns anyway because even a 0.5% death rate is 5x-10x the flu.
We also KNEW that young people were barely affected. Japanese teenagers famously kept going out after the schools closed because they knew they wouldn't be at risk.
Please stop pretending like suddenly our understanding of the disease mortality has fundamentally changed. We still have a lot to learn about the risks and consequences, but the needle on death rate has barely moved.
The experts were "wrong" because modeling exponential numbers + human behavior is stupid hard and fluctuates widely with small modeling errors, and guess what, the main models are getting updated because they UNDER-estimated deaths.
PS -- here is a survey of a bunch of experts from March 16th-17th. That's two months ago. the USA currently has ~90k deaths in two months. Of the experts on this panel, about half are still within range....
** Mortality figures are complicated in that the age, health, and possibly racial distribution of your population will cause variations in different populations.