According to a report out of China, we are already experiencing the mutated version which is less lethal (0.6%) than the original (5%). I am hopeful that as we identify and remove the strains causing more terrible effects via prevention and hospitalization, the remaining strains will mutate themselves away in a year or two.
Oh yeah? Have a look at Italian numbers. And then go to wiki and look at what was the deaths/cases at a similar moment in China it was like 1%! Symptoms occur on average 5 days after infection, hospitalization 6 days after that and death 7 days after that. To get true CFR you have to have at least 2 weeks without a new case
There’s two reasons that I could guess at: the age of the population itself, and the mild or asymptotic presentation of young folks with the way testing is ordered.
Unless you’re got widespread testing for even mild illness, you’re unlikely to see real numbers. South Korea has wide spread testing, so if you look at their numbers it also explains their low death rate:
There was a paper that discussed a L and an S strain the former of which is thought to be more deadly and was more dominate in Wuhan. In other areas the two are more equally distributed but the more deadly strain is still a large percentage of cases.