It's serious but not as bad as we're led to believe

A couple things from a conversation I had today with someone's whose wife is a nurse practitioner who works with the COVID patients in a local hospital.

First there are certainly some people who get very ill from COVID-19 and for some the added complication of this virus is enough to overwhelm their compromised immune and/or respiratory system, which is usually from pre-existing/underlying health conditions.

Second, the director told this guy's wife that for every new positive COVID test there are estimated to be at least 10 new asymptomatic cases.

Guess what that means...if there are 800 new tested cases, then there are probably 8,000 new asymptomatic (or even low symptom) cases. So, if the death rate is 0.26% for the confirmed cases, the actual death rate is much, much less. Probably by at least a factor of 10. So...maybe a death rate of 0.026%.

For the vast majority of people COVID-19 is not a serious illness.

The guy I talked to mentioned that he had been really sick for a couple of weeks, with a fever for 4 days. His wife was sick as well. Both of their COVID tests came back negative. The doctors don't know what they had. He said he hasn't been that ill with a fever in many years.

To me it seems likely that it was COVID, but the question is how reliable are the tests? How often do the tests return inaccurate results?

There are several viruses that can cause the "common cold". There are coronaviruses that cause the cold.

So, how often do COVID-19 tests return a false positive by detecting something like a coronavirus-caused cold? I'm sure the claim is the test is mostly accurate, but what are the false positive and false negative rates?

I see/hear reports of rising number of COVID cases, but the death rates really aren't going up. Are the tests returning more false positives? Is COVID not really as bad as officials want you to believe?

How much should the majority of the population sacrifice of their rights and liberties under the guise of protecting the vulnerable, when the actual death rate is likely a lot lower than we led to believe? Wouldn't it be better to identify the vulnerable and increase their protections?