https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
It doesn't matter if the number is 5% with a low infection rate, or 0.5% with a very high infection rate: both will lead to very large numbers of dead people unless we take severe action early on.
And so far they've been right. Covid-19 is causing huge amounts of excess mortality, even when compared to a really bad flu year.
And that’s with elective procedures being cancelled and everyone scared to go to the hospital for any reason. Here’s some new data indicating that half of the excess mortality in England might not be caused by COVID-19 itself: https://archive.is/2eKCW
The early pointing to South Korea’s CFR as low turned out to be misleading in the end due to I guess some issues relating to the data (probably because many cases were ongoing and the persons had neither died nor recovered).
Regarding models, it seems 0.15% is the new basis [2].
Even on the optimistic end of the range (0.1% fatality), with 13k deaths, that's 20% of the UK population infected, a long way from achieving herd immunity.
The other thing is that I invite people on hackernews to better control their anxiety. It is not so long ago that pointing that case fatality ratios in jurisdictions that didn't do mass testing and where there seemed to be many unreported cases with mild symptom was overestimating the fatality rate would get you treated of conspirary theorist. South Korea had been measuring a fatality ratio in that range (~0.6%) over a month ago and that was probably already an upper bound (due to not testing 100% of the population).
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/AmeshAA/status/124944656101010637...
[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/AmeshAA/status/124902067755179622...