Grundle, what's your basic assessment of where we stand today? Can we even compare where we are as a country to the rest of the world? Wouldn't you say the actual infection # is significantly higher in reality thus the mortality rate is considerably lower than .3?
I don't know shit.
I'd assumed exposure and infection back in March was much higher than numbers now available bear out. A national infection rate of around 15% seems consistent between various sources I've seen, higher of course in hot spots. A 0.3% fatality rate, while orders of magnitude better than the original grims of 2% or more, is still pretty bad, quite honestly. That number also jives with the earliest, most optimistic predictions. I think that Stanford guy had it around 0.25%.
I've plowed through a bunch of books on Spanish Flu and influenza-like pandemics in the last several books. None since and including SpanFlu were halted by a vaccine. Best info I could find on SARS was that vaccine trials were halted in 2012, nine years after the epidemic. If someone has better info, pleased to beings shown to be wrong. Of course, the medical industry has advanced a lot in 17 years. Still, I'm pessimistic on the prospects for a highly effective vaccine, and unfortunately, mainstream messaging has pegged reopening to a vaccine.
A common thread on the last pandemics, they just stop at some point. They run a certain course and then recede to a background disease, except for the particular SpanFlu strain, which disappeared. If I remember correctly, Philadelphia went from apocalyptic numbers to next to nothing over the course of around 2-3 weeks.
One prediction I still stand behind, is that eventually some pre-existing resistance, or vulnerability, will be found on this one. Genetic, crossover immunity, the Vitamin D thing, or something else all together. Best case would be Vitamin D, that is actionable. The rest is roll of the dice.
