Recall back from when this fiasco began - a few of the more honest scientists produced a model (using model loosely, was more of a statistical analysis) to capture the real IFR of COVID using a closed system as the sample, the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w
Back when the world was preparing for Covid and still using faulty Chinese data, the WHO predicted that the death rate for Covid was something like 5-10x higher than the true Covid death rate, because they took the confirmed cases and created a ratio of the confirmed deaths. But the problem was, the sample did not account for all confirmed covid cases, because of course, not everyone that has covid gets accounted for.
the study of the diamond princess did account for every case. because EVERYONE was tested.
(easy to do on a cruise ship)
the thing is.
in a tight/cramped space with air circulating room to room. cases will be high and deaths will be high..
and guess what the first solution to bring down the case/death count was..
... yep social distancing..
and guess what..
case R rates went down and death severity went down
this is because general population are not clustered together in a confined area so less viral load so more people asymptomatic in general population.
and because general population are not tested as rigoursly as the diamond princess its suggestive that although case numbers were low in general populations instances. there are probably 5x more infectees, just not being tested due to lack of showing symptoms due to social distancing giving them low viral loads
so thank you for confirming why social distancing was a good thing. due to the diamond princess study you mentioned