Well 4.5% is about 22M shares. Sometimes you can refer to the...

Well 4.5% is about 22M shares. Sometimes you can refer to the short position as days outstanding at average volume. So probably about 8 days needed to cover. The problem is that if you wanted to buy back 22M shares it would take far longer because a lot daily trade is just churn between algorithms. And the worst possible situation to buy back stock is one where gold prices are breaking out and money is really starting to come back into the market.

From the chart you can see that most shorters entered at <$1.50. The thing about being short is in theory you can lose a lot more than your original position because of the infinite upside.