Dr Francis Collins is the outgoing head of the National Institutes for Health. I’ve been following his blog for a while and was stunned to find this one in early September.
In that blog he cites a study, that the NIH funded that reports that by December 2020, at least 100 million Americans had been infected with Covid, five times the official count. Using that 5x multiplier on the total as of October 20, 2021 of 45,141,161 cases that means about 225 million cases have actually occurred and 225 million people have natural immunity. According to the journal Science, having this acquired immunity is better than being vaccinated. The article says:
The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label. The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19.
What this means is that ALL the data you’ve been reading about the chances of dying from Covid or the chances of hospitalization are grossly exaggerated.  For example, I found these data points on the NIH website.
They adjusted for confounding factors and calculated the death rate for each age group, including 0 per cent for under 4s, less than 0.1 per cent for people under 40, 0.36 per cent if 50 to 54, 2.17 if 70 to 74, 5 per cent if 80 to 84 and 16 per cent for those over 90.
Every one of those stats is five times too high.