[oldalum]

well, the good Stanford doctor lost me when he calculated the number of people who are infected in the U.S. by applying exponential growth to the first "seed" in the U.S. which he assumes was planted on January 1, and derived an IFR of 0.01%. The first known case in the U.S. was diagnosed on Jan. 21, in a man who traveled to the U.S. from Wuhan. He may not have been the first infected person to arrive, but no one including the good doctor knows that date, so that's a lot of extra exponenting he just did. Stopped watching at that point. The basic point, which is that we don't know the true IFR, and can't know it without an accurate denominator, is correct. But as other posters have noted, there's a lot of indirect evidence that it is much higher than 0.01%.

[oldalum]

well, the good Stanford doctor lost me when he calculated the number of people who are infected in the U.S. by applying exponential growth to the first "seed" in the U.S. which he assumes was planted on January 1, and derived an IFR of 0.01%. The first known case in the U.S. was diagnosed on Jan. 21, in a man who traveled to the U.S. from Wuhan. He may not have been the first infected person to arrive, but no one including the good doctor knows that date, so that's a lot of extra exponenting he just did. Stopped watching at that point. The basic point, which is that we don't know the true IFR, and can't know it without an accurate denominator, is correct. But as other posters have noted, there's a lot of indirect evidence that it is much higher than 0.01%.