I have not seen the 5.6 mortality rate you suggested. Problem is we have no idea what the denominator is in that equation. In some parts of the world doing the simple deaths divided by total cases detected, will yield numbers like 10-20% death rates, where in other countries, especially ones with better testing, we are seeing .1 to 1.6% death rates so far. It is going to hit the "rich" communities first, where the folks that travel a lot, and generally are healthy, where they become "super carriers," we are seeing this over and over.

Rich part of italy, rich part of the US. In colorado where I live, it is hitting the ski areas disproportionately hard at first, because, yep, rich people traveling from all over, going to the ski areas during prime ski season in colorado. (Spring break is a busy time for colorado ski resorts.) That town in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the rockies? Nope. Not yet. But when it does eventually hit, it is going to hit those remote towns, (that almost always have very little health capacity,) especially hard.

Big problem is we have no idea what the mortality rate is. We are just now starting to get a semi accurate picture of what the mortality rate is in Wuhan, but that was back when the virus was first starting, nothing was known about it, and it hit Wuhan a very polluted and population dense city, where especially men (lots of them smoke regularly) had poor health, especially in relation to fighting off covid-19.

This is NOT the spanish flu. Spanish flu liked to pick on the young and healthy. Not the case for covid-19. Also many of the rules of how viruses propagated back then over 100 years ago is very different then now.

We have much better communication systems now, and much better understanding of these kinds of viruses, even if this is a novel coronavirus. But we also have to weigh that against the fact that we have a much MUCH! more mobile society now. Billions have cars that can travel 100's of miles a day. And ofcourse we have planes and high speed rail, that can carry people 1000's of miles a day.

I think there are many undetected cases in the US, (country I am most familiar with.) and for the last 4-6 weeks that case count has been climbing exponentially. I think, starting yesterday, (saturday the 14th,) the growth rate on new cases is going to start to flatten out, and over the next week or 2, it may even slow down. Problem is, I would not be surprised at all if actual exposure to covid-19 count right now in the US is somewhere between 20k and 200k. So it is going to look like an exponential climb over next 2 weeks, but that is just a factor of availability of test kits, not actual cases.

Due to poor testing in the US, (and for many places around the world,) everything is delayed by a week or so. The 3k number we have now, is probably close to total case count the US had... at least a week ago. Until the US, (and other countries around the world,) have the capacity to test 10's of thousands of people a day, those countries really have no idea but guesses to how many cases they actually have. All we have is a snapshot.