The facts as we know them now based on the actual data, not predictive models, is that the antibody testing worldwide is supporting the theory that the infection rate of COVID-19 is between 20-40 times higher than current official numbers reflect. Even the most conservatively reported number from the Washington Post has infections outpacing the number of confirmed tested COVID cases by a factor of 10 or more:
"The new serological data, which is provisional, suggests that coronavirus infections greatly outnumber confirmed covid-19 cases, potentially by a factor of 10 or more. Many people experience mild symptoms or none at all, and never get the standard diagnostic test with a swab up the nose, so they’re missed in the official covid-19 case counts."
source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/heal...c215d8-87f7-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html
Aside from the misleading headline in the story above, it's clear that the morbidity rate is far higher than we anticipated or have tested for at this point, which in the inverse means the mortality rate is much lower than the current CDC stats allude. Additional antibody testing coupled with the unreliability in current COVID-19 testing procedures have all come to the same early conclusions. Anyone still touting a 5-7% mortality rate assigned to COVID-19 isn't using the current data collected, either because they're unaware or are purposefully misleading individuals.
Speaking of testing, many reports on the efficacy of the tests and the success of various countries around the world in testing large portions of their population are littered with misinformation. For weeks the media was touting Germany and South Korea as the model for the US when it came to testing our population; some reports even erroneously touted Germany having testing the majority of its population (82 million). Currently the data shows that the US has surpassed 6 million tested while Germany is right around 2.5 million tested and South Korea well under 1 million (source:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-total-tests-for-covid-19):
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This means that any correlation to the mortality rate of COVID-19 based solely on these tests can't be taken seriously by any scientific measure.
Finally, those that are touting a vaccine as a fix to all of this and the milestone by which we can all go back to our lives really have no idea how viral vaccines are produced or their efficacy rate. Like most viruses—including Influenza—COVID-19 has already mutated and hasn't shown signs that it won't continue to do so in the future. It's quite possible that any vaccine currently being worked on is already outdated given the mutation rate of the pathogen. Not that such a vaccine wouldn't have some impact, but it certainly won't be a mic bullet as being touted by those in the media. Most virulent vaccines, like the flu shot, are produced with a degree of estimation towards which strain of the virus will cause the most morbidity in the population that season. Most of the time this estimation is incorrect (see 2016-2017). Even if a vaccine was ready tomorrow the chance that it is targeting the most prevalent strain of the virus or has a 100% efficacy rate (scientifically impossible) is nil.
So, you can sit in your house waiting on a miracle vaccine that will never come, trying to protect everyone in the world from the risk of death, or we can do what we did during the 1918 and 1919 outbreak of the Spanish flu (where there was no vaccine or treatments) and quarantine the sick, practice good hygiene, and build a herd immunity among the healthy. But this time we have two viable treatments for mild and severe cases of COVID: Hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin and Remdesivir.
