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Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

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Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#241

Post by lifthrasiir »

antpls wrote: post #228
cycrutchfield wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand people like you who can look at the current numbers and say "Oh, it's not so bad" while also conveniently ignoring that the numbers are growing exponentially. People that are raising the alarm are not talking about the numbers now, they are talking about the numbers in the future if nothing is done to address it.

This is a new virus, _no one_ knows about the future. Data we have now could be biased toward an hidden variable we didn't figure out yet.

One can predict the future with bounded error bars though. Weeks of observation yielded some numbers including R0 around 2 and CFR around one digit percent (yes, we still don't know if it's around 1% or 2%, but it is certainly not 0.1% [1] or 10%), so 0.1---5% of the total population will die somehow due to COVID-19 if absolutely nothing is done. For the reference, less than 1% of the total population dies each year in developed countries. Enough reason to be alerted.

[1] CFR is a function of age (notably among others) and more careful analysis would involve demographics. Still, the rough order of magnitude doesn't change.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#242

Post by cma »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #234
cma wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ioannidis even questions if ventilators are helping. He basically says without evidence to the contrary, they may be a placebo (the part about ICU beds). And all the low CFRs he cherry picked have now increased dramatically.

That's not exactly a ridiculous hypothesis. A ventilator is life support; you're put on it when you're in the process of dying in hopes that something will happen before you finish.

Your lungs are filling up with fluid and your blood oxygen level is going below livable. Drain it and and ventilate which usually works much better than not doing so with pneumonia in general, or just who knows, no good empirical studies in ventilating with pneumonia related to this specific respiratory virus?

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#243

Post by watwut »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #2

Common sense needs to prevail over mania, numbers over hyperbole and science over conjecture. But even then, this is hard if our data is collected poorly and then poorly disseminated. So what is the answer then? Maybe a strengthening of resolve against all forms of panic? Is there a single event in history has been solved by panic?

Epidemiologists were producing numbers, papers, estimates from the december and continue to produce them. But somehow these don't count?

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#244

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #219
antpls wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the charts? If you didn't know there is a global epidemic, would you have been able to see it on these curves? In France and Italy, there were between 50000 and 60000 deaths per month in 2018 and 2019. If most of those people died because of 2 or 3 accumulated factors, covid19 would be just one more factor. But maybe those people would have died one month later anyway without covid19

I don't understand people like you who can look at the current numbers and say "Oh, it's not so bad" while also conveniently ignoring that the numbers are growing exponentially. People that are raising the alarm are not talking about the numbers now, they are talking about the numbers in the future if nothing is done to address it.

The numbers are growing exponentially until they don't. You can argue that they would have, had extreme measures not been put in place, and there are reasonable arguments for that. But you have to keep track of the fact that it is an argument you're making and not an observation directly from the data. Otherwise you won't update properly on new information.

For example, one thing I've seen people worry about is that there could be huge numbers of undetected infections; one guy quoted me 1.5 million for the US's 40k known cases. This would be wonderful news if true - death rates and hospitalization rates are 37 times smaller than believed, and the theoretical peak is nearer than we'd thought? But I've universally seen people present these scenarios as bad news, because they've internalized "numbers going to grow exponentially" as an observed fact rather than a contingent conclusion.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#245

Post by drno123 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #145
jamilbk wrote: post #142

It’s much easier to quantify the harms of allowing business as usual and letting the infection spread (namely # of deaths) than it is quantifying the cascading repercussions of a massive global economic meltdown. Accordingly, world leaders are being judged based on their ability to contain the spread rather than prevent economic devastation. As a society we are faced with navigating the delicate balance between how m…

If 10% of the population needs ICU and dies because they cant get it, then there is no business as usual.

In Italy, median age of people who have died of Corona is 83 for women and 79 for men [1]. Normal life expectancy is lower than that in the United States [2]. Lockdown measures will have severe impact on GDP, and GDP is correlated with life expectancy [3].

It can easily happen that by killing economy in order to save lives, we may actually be doing the opposite in the long term.

[1] https://www.iss.it/web/guest//comunicati-stampa/-/asset_publ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-pe...

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#246

Post by johnohara »

joe_the_user wrote: post #208
tlrobinson wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we expect to get better mortality data in the US than other countries?

I don't think many people knowing the facts are expecting that. It's that people, including me, dread the moments when the facts become manifest. This will prove us right but I will take no comfort in that confirmation. On the off chance that these (implausible sounding) arguments turn out right, well, woohoo, great.

Finishing the math on this is very sobering which is why I was intrigued by the original post.

I truly hope John Ioannidis is correct and SARS-CoV-2 is not as virulent. We are about to see in the next week or so.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#247

Post by fcurts »

> An argument in favor of lockdowns is that postponing the epidemic wave (“flattening the curve”) gains time to develop vaccines and reduces strain on the health system. However, vaccines take many months (or years) to develop and test properly.

It's not only about vaccines but about treatments in general. There is a good chance that we'll have a drug that significantly improves outcomes long before we have a vaccine. I don't understand how a peer-reviewed paper can overlook this.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#248

Post by lifthrasiir »

antpls wrote: post #210
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corvid 19 deaths are doubling every 3 days in US and a few other countries. Do the extrapolation.

Even in Italy, the National Health Institute said that 88% of the declared "dead by covid19" had in fact at least 1 or 2 other pre-morbidities. If a 80 years old dies from heart attack and is tested positive by covid19, it will count as "dead by covid19". The numbers we see in the news of "CFR" for the covid19 are, in my opinion, inaccurate. The number only shows the spread of the infection, not its actual fatality r…

CFR is a death rate of the population with particular medical conditions by definition. It is a correct usage.

CFR doesn't translate to the additional death rate, but it does contribute to the death rate by unspecified amount. In particular high enough CFR directly translates to the additional death rate when it exceeds the original crude death rate.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#249

Post by leereeves »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #165
Barrin92 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, and if any of those other viruses caused a world wide pandemic, I missed it. They do actually. Several of the outbreaks studied among the papers were influenza pandemics, coronavirus pandemics, and SARS. (page ~110-120) This rhetoric you're starting here about bringing out the war drums to fight invisible enemies is exactly what Ioannidis is afraid of. It is not scientific, it is not based on evidence, and it…

Doesn’t influenzas cause a pandemic every year? I’ve read from various sources influenza cause multiple hundred-thousand deaths every year.

Yes, influenza causes over 250,000 deaths worldwide each year.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/cdc-says-more-people-die...

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#250

Post by cycrutchfield »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #244
cycrutchfield wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand people like you who can look at the current numbers and say "Oh, it's not so bad" while also conveniently ignoring that the numbers are growing exponentially. People that are raising the alarm are not talking about the numbers now, they are talking about the numbers in the future if nothing is done to address it.

The numbers are growing exponentially until they don't. You can argue that they would have, had extreme measures not been put in place, and there are reasonable arguments for that. But you have to keep track of the fact that it is an argument you're making and not an observation directly from the data. Otherwise you won't update properly on new information. For example, one thing I've seen people worry about is that…

In every country where we have seen case load sigmoid out, there have been heavy mitigation and suppression efforts put in place that preceded it by several weeks. Thus far, many European countries and the US have only just started to get serious about this. Therefore I am fairly confident that we will be in the exponential growth phase for a while longer.
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