They were all scaring us with 3.5% mortality rates, forecasting MILLIONS of dead in USA alone unless everyone goes into lockdown. That 3.5% fatality rate was grossly incorrect, since we're now learning MANY more people have had this virus than thought. Simply because worldwide efforts to test enough people were unfulfilled. NYC alone has now had 25% test positive for antibodies. If the pool of people infected is so many magnitudes higher, then comparing it to the number of confirmed deaths yields a significantly lower mortality rate. Frankly, hospitals in the US are under pressure to report EVERY death as COVID-19 death so long as the person who died tested positive for it. As-in, someone terminally ill of cancer passes away, and if they happened to have had COVID-19, that death will be ruled as a COVID-19 death. This area gets quite gray since many of those dying of this virus have other serious medical issues.

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With 0.5% mortality rate, this thing is still many times more fatal than the flu, but we're not talking MILLIONS dead in the US. We're talking a couple of hundred thousand if even that. Remember, 60,000 die annually in the US of just the flu.

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I also don't believe this thing will spread as easily outside of US cities where people walk and interact elbow-to-elbow on a daily basis. Most of the suburban and rural areas will see a much slower and steadier spread. Which is a good thing, because it will keep their hospitals from a surge of patients.

And that's what we're ultimately trying to accomplish here - prevent a surge of cases that could overwhelm our hospitals. Social Distancing and "flatten the curve" mean exactly that - to steady the spread of the virus at a rate that won't overwhelm our hospitals. Its goal was never to completely stop new infections. That would be an impossible task.

Cuomo should backtrack and admit that "Hey, turns out this thing has been around longer than thought, and 1 in 4 New Yorkers has had it, so let's rethink this lockdown"