> Unfortunately, actual hospitalizations and and deaths rule out a virtual epidemic so this is not a hope to cling to.
Not necessarily. In theory all the deaths could have some other cause, i.e. some fraction of people with a different underlying fatal condition had false positive tests for this coronavirus and then died of the other condition.
That's probably not what's happening, but it's theoretically possible. (It's also probable that some of the reported deaths are that, but who knows what percentage.)
