You're going to have to back up that 97% with data and sources. 1.6% is about what I was guessing (sorry, I rounded because I was doing the math mentally) -- and that's pretty much what it's been all along. My point is, 1.6 percent of the whole population (America or the world), or any reasonable fraction thereof, is an ungodly number. .016 x 330,000,000 = 5,280,000 dead. If we assume that not everybody gets it -- let's say ultimately a third of us, that's still 1,760,000 dead.
Ye gods, we're almost halfway there now. And, remember that 1.6% is the risk for the population at large, not the just over 10% of us with diabetes (34 million and change), the 3% of us who are immune compromised, or the 13% of the population over age 65, some of whom overlap with the other two groups. Those tiny-sounding percentages disguise lot of human suffering.