In what would appear to be an about-face on his previous statements, Dr. Fauci has co-authored a report on the virus in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which he asserts that the mortality rate of the virus may be much closer to a bad flu. This is FAR lower than what he originally stated 2 months ago.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387
The key paragraph from the article is
"On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the
Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall
clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively."