[Mr Rogers]

The point is the percentages. What they are seeing is a vastly larger denominator WHEN YOU TEST PEOPLE WITHOUT SYMPTOMS! They have tested roughly 5% of their entire population. Over 6% of those tested already have it - and yet only 2.5% of those cases are sick enough to need hospitalization. That suggests the virus is not nearly as deadly as we think.

If I’m missing something, I’ll love to hear why this is not good news. If half of the people have no symptoms at all, then our denominator for calculating death rates would cut our death rate in half - because we only test the half showing symptoms.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

It’s the asymptomatic carriers who spread it the most.

[DHerion]

We already know a lot of people have it and have not and will not, or choose not to be tested. All I wrote was Iceland is too small and isolated country to give us anything definitive...We should randomly test 10,000 here and see where we are at...I don’t care about Iceland.

[lightman]

It is good but it is not news.

All along we have known that:

MOST people have been exposed.

SOME people who have been exposed have symptoms.

MANY people who have symptoms have mild cases.

A FEW people who have symptoms—mostly with underlying conditions—get really sick.

And of them, some die.

This is NOT the Bubonic plague.

We have crashed the world economy for seasonal sniffle.

[brookwood]

“Over 6% of those tested already have it “
The article states that people were offered a free test. It is likely that many more people who decided to take the test had symptoms. If you were perfectly healthy why would anyone bother to take a test? So the 6% overall infection rate is biased high. We need a random sample of a large population to be tested to find the true infection rate.

[SunkenCiv]

That suggests the virus is not nearly as deadly as we think.

/bingo

[Svartalfiar]

If I’m missing something, I’ll love to hear why this is not good news. If half of the people have no symptoms at all, then our denominator for calculating death rates would cut our death rate in half - because we only test the half showing symptoms.

This is both good and bad. The good, obviously, is that the mortality rate is much lower.

The bad thing is that being more widespread, means a lot more will catch it. So even though the percentage of deaths is lower, the high total amount means there will be more deaths numerically. If 10% of 1M people are dying, that's only 100 people. If 1% of 100M people die, that's a thousand deaths.