I wrote '... to suggest covid is that harmless.' Should have phrased that better and avoided the word 'harmless' which indeed you didn't use. What I meant was your comment on covid having a less than one percent death rate - which, as I explained in the rest of the post, is only true when you can ensure that all people who catch it can get the medical care they need. So far, that has been the case, but if the numbers get much higher, it won't be anymore. As some parts of northern Italy found out the hard way in the spring.

Of course it's a minority that is admitted to the hospital. It's easy to find how many people are hospitalized for covid in the US right now (about 100 000 - see link for more detail and numbers per state), the difficulty is knowing how many people have covid right now. Considering the number of daily cases and the average duration I see reported, I guess something between 1 and 2 million, hence 5 to 10 percent?

But those 100k hospitalized patients are already taking up about 12 to 15 percent of total hospital capacity in the US - which of course also needs to cover all the things it normally covers. In the hardest hit states, it's approaching 25 percent of capacity. Those states are also reporting ICUs being at 90 percent or more of capacity (that's in total, not just covid patients). It should be pretty clear that there's not a lot of room anymore for those percentages to grow, before you have to start denying hospital beds to covid patients who need them, or you deny them to other patients who need them.

Smokers can decide to stop smoking, though. People can't simply decide to not contract covid.