Thank you. I was going to post the same thing.

We have a classic numerator denominator problem with some sampling bias thrown in. Many deaths are landing firmly in the numerator, perhaps wrongly. If I have end-stage cancer or heart disease or emphysema or a dozen other maladies that could mean my imminent demise, and I get COVID, did COVID kill me? According to the stats, yes. Some of these people dying wouldn’t live through a stiff breeze, but COVID gets credit.
At the same time, we have no idea how many people have been infected, so the denominator is a vast unknown. The testing in Germany shows at least the possibility that our positive cases are actually an order of magnitude (or several orders) higher than our official numbers.

Consider that official numbers peg the case rate at around 800,000 for the US with total deaths at 35,000.

That’s a 4% mortality rate (so far). But if just 1% of the US population has been infected, then the mortality rate drops to 8/10 of 1%.

Given what we know about some of this sporadic testing, it seems likely that at least 1% of Americans have been infected. The real mortality rate could very realistically end up being about as bad as a bad flu year. Obviously the total death numbers will be worse because no one had immunity or any vaccination protection like we do for the flu.

But if it turns out that COVID is only marginally more dangerous than the flu, someone is going to have some explaining to do for screwing up the economy for tens of millions of Americans and countless others around the world who are now out of work with nothing on the horizon.