The thing that gets me is there isn't enough data to draw any conclusions yet.
One of the data problems is how deaths are reported. So many countries seemingly openly admitting that people are counted regardless of whether it actually caused their death or not.
And accuracy here is important because it sets the zestiest in the public mind of how dangerous this is compared with others seasonal flu's. That then permeates through society and ultimately impacts government policy.
Indeed.
I'll cut and paste the problems we have here from another post
I think we need to look at it rationally at the moment. The statistics we are recording here are absolutely not meaningful or useful as they stand and serve only to make the situation sound worse than it currently is. This is being leveraged by the press somewhat and the governments and being relatively poorly extrapolated by our universities into a set of wild assumptions. Granted wild assumptions are the only places we go but presenting them as fact and policy is somewhat disingenuous. Some problems with our recording:
1. We have no antibody tests that are viable therefore we don't have any "numerator" for the total deaths per infection.
2. We're not recording people who left hospital after recovery believe it or not.
3. We're not even recording the actual health outcomes, just the deaths. Not everything kills you even if it messes you up badly.
4. The recording method they use doesn't actually have a causal relation to the mortality as such. If someone comes in after crashing a motorbike, tests positive for covid-19 even if asymptomatic or if the test is contaminated (a big problem apparently!) then they get lumped in with the death statistics.
5. A lot of the statistical outliers are actually reported heavily on such as younger deaths. These are sad but inevitable. My nephew died from the flu a few years back as an example much to the surprise of everyone who wrote it off as "just flu".
6. The current infection testing is a snapshot of the status quo.
7. Some of the mortality risks are amplified by our handling of it and outcome of "viral load" which overwhelms the immune system.
Alas we have no idea what the outcome is going to be and the data we have is mostly trash. We are unfortunately a reactionary experiment at the moment and there's no exit plan other than "now what?" really. We are 12 months off on a vaccination and we don't know what the mortality statistics are, we have no viable testing and damage to society from the side effects from the reaction may outnumber the immediate deaths over a decade span. I suspect the "now what?" is we either burn everyone or some of us and let it run.
But, so far, all risks adjusted against what data we have, the mortality risk is literally just doubling your base line chance of dropping dead at the age you are. Still not desirable but at the end of the day considerably better than the statistics may suggest. But it's stil a shit show. If we have 10x the deaths we have now, which would be ugly, that still only represents a death rate of 0.79% as an end game. We lose 0.91% of our population every year at the moment as well from normal death as a comparison. 10% I doubt it will be.