[cjbprime]

On the other hand, I don't think "perfect medical care" is an accurate description of being quarantined on a boat with limited diagnostics and an illness your doctors have never seen before, and I also think the cruisegoing cohort skews much, much older than a general population.

[woofie11]

Of course. As I said, you can try to paint a pretty picture, or an ugly picture. We don't know mortality rate very well yet (or much of anything else). Ever estimate has huge error bars in both directions, and the scientific estimates are sort of a median.

People in the US tend to look for every silver lining, preliminary study showing a potential breakthrough, and any reason it might not be so bad. That's a bias which has led to this not being taken seriously enough at any point.

I kind of treat the WHO estimates (1% with ventilator, 6% without, and 3.5% median) as just that: best-available estimates. It might be much, much worse. It might be much, much better.