Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf]

Big time. This is a different disease based on different age brackets.

Under 48 there basically similar chance of dying as the flu.

National health policy should not be based on personal outcomes.

As others say, this is way too much to say "meh", but I do think it needs a rethink of the lockdown strategies.

Lockdowns kill people; people with cancer, people who need surgeries, people who lose income to support themselves. Clearly, so does Covid, and we need to balance it.

Can we do better, as societies, if we aggressively protecting old and vulnerable people, and let fitter people continue with their lives? This can avoid the economic collapse of lockdowns, bring about some degree of herd immunity, and yes, trading some lives saved by lockdown for lives saved by "normality".

Suppose 70% of the society is under 50, and has a IFR of 0.1%. Take UK (65mn people), and suppose everyone in that group gets it. That would lead to 45k fatalities (very close to what was already experienced), plus herd immunity, and lack of economic collapse. It's clearly not so simple, but it's start.

I'm in no position to question the research, but I spoke once to a professor of respiratory diseases at UCL, who quoted that mild Covid cases often do not register in antibody testing (for reasons unclear), so I wonder if even the 0.3% is an overestimate.

Here's another recent meta-study (preprint) on the same topic: Assessing the Age Specificity of Infection Fatality Rates for COVID-19: Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis, and Public Policy Implications https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...

Abstract: This paper assesses the age specificity of the infection fatality rate (IFR) for COVID-19 using results from 29 seroprevalence studies as well as five countries that have engaged in comprehensive tracing of COVID-19 cases. The estimated IFR is close to zero for children and younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85. We find that differences in the age structure of the population and the age-specific prevalence of COVID-19 explain nearly 90% of the geographical variation in population IFR. Consequently, protecting vulnerable age groups could substantially reduce the incidence of mortality.

I think those results are in the same ballpark as what Ioannidis calculates. This isn't good news, really, not for middle-aged-adults anyway.

IFR(age) = 0.1 x 10^((age-82)/20)

Extreme poverty is expected increased by 150 million people world wide bc of Covid.

I'd wager there's a lot of people whose kids are running around a shantytown shoeless who would agree that this is acceptble levels of risk.

> Lockdowns kill people

Agreed. But what causes lockdowns? An uncontrolled pandemic. What does uncontrolled pandemic also cause? Collapse of healthcare infrastructure, which is a civil emergency that also results in countless deaths.

Lockdowns, as implemented in places like the US, are a reactive measure because of a system-wide failure to adopt and maintain proactive measures needed to control things. You don’t arrive at “herd immunity” without them, but mass deaths, both from the disease and being unable to receive other routine or emergency healthcare.