Quote Originally Posted by Fellbeast View Post
Good point but 250,000 sounds too high. I know they reckoned by May/June c 3.5 million had caught it. Just dividing number of deaths by 0.01 is a rough rule of thumb using the 1% mortality rate. So using the within 28 day mortality figure that would mean 4.5 million of the population have had it but, given that the real death figure might be nearer 60,000 that might be 6 million. That means that there’s still 60 million of us waiting to catch it!

There’s some thought that the current mortality rate, clustered around northern and midlands cities in the main, might be a bit higher than before, despite better hospital treatments, because on average there are more poorer people in the north than the south, where the first wave mainly did its damage
I would be very surprised if the overall mortality rate is higher than in the spring. Back then a fair chunk of deaths were of people in care homes. One would hope that the mistakes that were made then such as releasing people from hospitals into care homes, lack of testing and inadequate PPE will not be repeated. At least not to the same extent. There are the better treatments as well, which you mentioned.

You are using an infection fatality rate of 1% but that is on the high side of the studies that have been done. Most now seem to put it at between 0.5% and 0.66% (some lower). Even Imperial College revised their initial 0.9% estimate to 0.66%.