> "We know for sure that the bulk of people who have ever had this disease are still sick"

Most people who contract Covid-19 fully recover by around 7 days after showing symptoms. Severe cases that go to hospital? Yes, recovery may take a long time.

The bulk of people who got sick enough to get tested and/or go to the doctor are still sick. Remember, the hypothesis is that there are a large number of infections mild enough to not be reported, tested, or hospitalized.

Yes, but if they are the same disease, then the asymptomatic/symptomatic fraction of cases must be the same over time[1]. So a bunch of people who had the disease asymptomatically weeks ago should have shown up in a spike of people with symptoms, and it didn't.

[1] Or if they weren't, that would be a BIG result and very surprising. It's absolutely not something you can assume to make an argument.

Pathogens evolve: https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr...

Actually SARS-CoV-2 has been found to have a comparatively low mutation rate. But my point was that now you're not just positing a very large undetected outbreak of COVID-19, you're positing a very large undetected outbreak of an itself-undtected variant strain of COVID-19 that just happens to have the properties needed to produce the overmeasurement that you want to see in the case fatality rate.

See the problem with that logic?

> Actually SARS-CoV-2 has been found to have a comparatively low mutation rate.

Compared to what, a rhinovirus?

> you're positing a very large undetected outbreak of an itself-undetected variant strain of COVID-19

From the linked study, it appears that at least one variant has been detected:

"Population genetic analyses of 103 SARS-CoV-2 genomes indicated that these viruses evolved into two major types (designated L and S), that are well defined by two different SNPs that show nearly complete linkage across the viral strains sequenced to date."

How would PCR test results give us any sense of the relative spread of these two strains (or indeed others)? Is it possible that you're motivated to dismiss ideas that challenge your understanding? I'm not convinced that it's the correct explanation for these observations, but the argument that it's impossible seems pretty weak.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it can't be simply assumed to make an unrelated point about case fatality rate. If you want to cite me a study showing a separate, weaker strain of COVID-19 that explains how the CFR is much lower than we think you need to show me the actual science, not just assert that it exist.

Because the obvious hypothesis is that it's one disease and one outbreak and the CFR is what we measure and not something else.

Different hypotheses are obvious to different people. You're hearing one of the scariest ones - partly because it's great business for the media and political industries, and partly because it supports the belief that we can accurately measure an in-progress epidemic of this kind with our modern technology. Here are some very experienced folks with less-scary "obvious" hypotheses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UO3Wd5urg0

https://www.globalresearch.ca/open-letter-professor-sucharit...

The exponential curve is consistent with the exponential increase in testing.

If a stable 30% of a pop has X at any given time, and you test 10 people for X the first week, 100 the next week, 1000 the next week, etc. you will have a nice exponential curve of the number of cases while, in reality, nothing all that exciting is happening.

Have you seen a scary graph anywhere in the media that normalizes for the number of tests given? I haven't.

The exponential curve in deaths and ICU admissions is independent of testing (and wouldn’t exist if the virus had been endemic in the population before March).

The exponential curve in deaths would be reflective of exponential testing/ Once again, if you have a stable X percent of people dying from Y, an exponential increase in testing for Y will give the illusion of an exponential increase in Y deaths.

As far as ICU admissions, that is an extremely subjective number, based on individual hospital policies; from my conversations with local HCPs, of two patients in the same degree of distress, the one who tests positive will have a greater likelihood of being put into a quarantined ICU for covid cases. There is no sinister reason behind this; its just that the covid patient has a much greater chance or taking a rapid turn for the worse.

Anyway, my statement (now downvoted) isn't meant to be controversial. It's just a fact. We have had an exponential increase in testing in many parts of the countries... posting the results and then having a newscaster say, "Look at the scary exponential curve" is absurd. There could be -- and most likely is -- an exponential rise in the number of cases. But, using the graphs without backing out the curve in the testing would get you an F on a freshman statistics quiz.