Infection fatality rate is much lower

Nature journal reports:

One of the most crucial questions about an emerging infectious disease such as the new coronavirus is how deadly it is. After months of collecting data, scientists are getting closer to an answer.

Researchers use a metric called infection fatality rate (IFR) to calculate how deadly a new disease is. It is the proportion of infected people who will die as a result, including those who don’t get tested or show symptoms. ...

estimates an IFR of 0.6% for the total population, and an IFR of 5.6% for people aged 65 and older.

It doesn't mention it, but that means a very small IFR for healthy people under age 50.

By 2022, the Wuhan virus could infect 300M Americans. New treatments and vaccines could be available, but they may not help old folks much. So we could eventually see as many as 2M dead, mostly old people with multiple other health problems. Probably a lot less.

The CDC now admits that the fatality rate is a lot lower than that. The BBC reports, since that Nature article appeared:

At least 20 million people in the US may already have been infected with Covid-19, according to the latest estimate by health officials.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says the true number of cases is likely to be 10 times higher than the reported figure. ...

The US has recorded 2.4m confirmed infections and 122,370 deaths.

This means that the fatality rate is about the same as the common flu. For healthy people under age 50, the rate is about 0.01%.

54K of those 122k deaths have been in nursing homes. This is primarily a disease of the elderly.

The authorities have been lying to us. They told us that masks were useless, that ventilators were essential, that hospitals were going to be overwhelmed, that schools needed to be closed, and that BLM protests were just fine. California hospitals have been operating at 5-8% capacity.