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Even without vaccines or treatments, covid wasn’t ever deadly enough to make a big difference. It seems like the mortality was between 1 in a hundred and 1 in a thousand, and at that heavily skewed towards older population.

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Latest numbers show the US with ~2.7 deaths/1000 cases. The global rate is higher: 14.3/1000. Just as it was 700 years ago case and death rates as reported by local authorities vary widely across locations.

FWIW US confirmed case rate (cases/million) currently stands at 236000, or 24% of the population. Of course some other countries beat that by a mile: ATM among the top 30 nations (in terms of total cases) the case rate title belongs to Israel which has 370000/million, but interestingly COVID deaths are much lower at 1.04/1000.

Numbers in the UK suggest higher death rates. There seem to have been something in the order of 150,000 excess deaths with fewer than 20 million positives (with a free and extensive testing programme). Both estimates come with caveats but this still suggest that pre Omicron strains had higher mortality rates. The key is using excess deaths statistics which seem much less subjective.

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