if the death rate for the virus is 0.6%, a more acceptable estimate, than we would expect upwards of a million total cases in quebec, at this point. even if you creep it up to 1%, you're still looking at upwards of 600,000.

as we've seen low-ball testing throughout canada, the most reasonable way to explain the dramatic disconnect is to point fingers at the tests. i know that the media was focusing on false positives when these tests rolled out, but the actual issue in front of doctors was false negatives. that is, the tests available at the time were known to miss a large number of cases. it's still hard to recoup reasonable numbers out of the ones presented, given published error rates, unless you assume that they're over-sampling rural areas relative to urban areas.

again, there's really only two possibilities, given that we know that death rates are pushing 1% at the very highest, and should be lower in advanced health care systems like canada.

1) canada has an astronomically high death rate, compared to similar countries or
2) the data is drastically underestimating the prevalence of antibody immunity in the general population

...and (2) is far more likely.