If you have a study that projects what the fatalities would have been with a shorter isolation period (e.g. only march and first two weeks of April), that would be noteworthy. Pointing to this early CDC study as a figure for what would have transpired had the economy not been shut down is not sound.
1. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coro...
Not so, for example the mortalities from the diamond princess are _higher_ than the ones being used to drive those projections. The fact that it takes time for people to die has held down the estimated mortality during exponential case growth.
Effectively every reputable source is observing that the early death rate projections were substantially inflated. China's reported death rate is 0.5% - and they're the ones with the most experience with the virus. Germany only recent started random testing. They previously had a fatality rate of 2%, but after random testing they found that 14% of the population already had antibodies - thus lower the death rate down to 0.37% [1]. There's a vast difference between asking "out of the people who got sick enough to go to the hospital, what portion people infected with coronavirus died?" and "what portion of people infected with coronavirus died".
You're using old data. 2% of the diamond princess infected have died so far. Another 7% of the infected are still reported as not recovered yet.
There is substantial evidence for other viral infections that infection severity (spanning from asymptomatic to dead) is related to dosage.
There is limited information so far for covid19 but some informal evidence that this is true for it too: Young healthcare workers appear to be dying a a much higher rate than similarly healthy members of the public who are sars-cov-2 positive.
If this is the case, social distancing will reduce the number of people who get serious infections and reduce the number who die.
Even if not, preventing overload of the hospitals will significantly reduce the number who die. Delaying infections until we better know how to treat the disease from anti-virals to simply care techniques will almost certantly reduce the number who die.
> Say 310,000 people would have died without social distancing (more than 5x the current projections). T
CDC's projection was 1.7 million dead before accounting for hospital overload.