Straw man. No one thinks the media should "cover it up". However, It would be more responsible for the media to not present the public with so much obvious misinformation about the virus.
That said I'm not aware of the WHO saying the IFR was .1-.3%, I've consistently seen estimates of .5-1.5%.
That said, in Italy the CFR is 15%, and reasonable estimates for the IFR wouldn't be below 2%, with 5% being completely reasonable.
I know the difference between CFR and IFR. But i doubt journalists who wrote about covid-19 fatality knew that, such details are too technical for mainstream media. The idea conveyed by media was simply 'most people would get it as there is no immunity, and there is ~5% fatality rate'.
In that time we already have order of magnitude lower IFR estimates from WHO (e.g. from covid-19 situation report 30).
> we have estimates of the IFR which are more in line with 0.9 to 1.5% (based on the antibody tests in NYC for example).
In different areas it seems to be different. NYC was hit particularly bad, so it is not a good idea to generalize data from that. In Heinsberg (Germany) study, the IFR is estimated to be 0.37, although Heinsberg was also hit hard.
> The IFR for the flu is 0.1% in the bad year ... That's 10 times higher, I don't know about you, but an order of magnitude is pretty significant in my book.
I did not compare covid-19 to flu. It is true that covid-19 is order of magnitue worse than seasonal flu. My point was that it is order of magnitude better than media image of covid-19.
The articles I’ve seen talking about this usually explain that other severe illnesses can cause such symptoms.
The unusual thing about the coronavirus is that it causes severe illness in so many - resulting in not only an extraordinary number of deaths but also of other damage to the body.