> - another thread mentioned corona virus being temperature-sensitive. Can that be correlated with deaths by city?
Nope.
> - are there different strains of covid-19 with different strengths?
Nope.
> - what stats do we have that are reliable?
Very few, but we've got lower bounds.
> - H5N1 and H1N1 were also corona viruses. what can we learn from them?
Those are influenza strains, not corona viruses. Did he actually say that? If so I missed that bit of stupidity. We use the same epidemiological models for flu. I don't know where he got the idea that we don't.
> - The reason we shut down the economy is because there's not enough ventilators, so it's worthwhile to look at the numbers, while making more ventilators.
Uh...no.
> - has anybody survived corona virus and being on a respirator? If not, the lockdown may not be helping since we aren't developing herd immunity to it.
Yes. And herd immunity is not the goal here. Herd immunity involves a nontrivial percentage of the population dead and 20% of the population in intensive care for weeks. That will destroy the economy much more than any lockdown measure we could take.