Originally posted by piorunz
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The 99.9% number goes back to the early days. IIRC it was not survival rate once infected but also included an estimate of "chance of getting infected" back when people were saying that COVID-19 would go away on its own. Most of that "high chance of survival" came from a high chance of not getting infected in the first place, which turned out not to be true without vaccines and/or lockdowns.
I guess another possibility (from your wording) is that you are lumping COVID-19 in with other coronaviruses to get that 99.9% number, but I don't think that works either. Coronaviruses are implicated in some sub-types of the common cold but also in diseases which have higher fatality rates than COVID-19, as coder pointed out. The regular influenza viruses are not coronaviruses.
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