Infection fatality rate of Covid-19 inferred from seroprevalence data [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by just-juan-post » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

NelsonMinar wrote: post #155

The author, John Ioannidis, is a discredited researcher on Covid-19. He and his Stanford colleages are responsible for a terribly written antibody study done back in March on residents of Santa Clara County. The statistics in that paper were egregiously bad and seem cooked to meet foregone political conclusions. Some reporting: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis... https://www.mercurynews.co…

Let's take John out of the discussion.

On Oct 05 the WHO officially announced there were 750m cases worldwide. On that day their official fatality count was ~1m. This comes out to an IFR of 0.13%

Do you have an issues with this statistic as well?

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

#242

Post by matthewmacleod » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #224

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a debunked claim that arose from conflating IFR vs CFR. Please source your claim. In terms of overall IFR Influenza and COVID-19 appear to be comparable. Influenza kills at least an order of magnitude more children, and for those in between roughly 35-55 they both kill about the same, and for the very elderly COVID-19 is multiple times more deadly. The overall IFRs are very comprable except COVID-19 preferent…

All of your analysis falls apart at one crucial point: all of the data we have are for Covid19 IFR given the massive lockdowns and dedicated hospital infrastructure . If you look at regions that were ineffective in handling the spread and had their hospital capacity overwhelmed, mortality jumps through the roof - I think it was higher than 10% in Lombardia before the lockdowns. And remember that hospitals can't work…

I am genuinely baffled by the number of people who are slipping around this point. We don’t regularly have hospital ITUs stuffed full of people with influenza, threatening to overwhelm capacity. We don’t generally have city-, region- and country-wide lockdowns where transmission is massively curtailed. Even a very casual look at what happened in different countries makes it clear that this disease has an obviously different character.

It really feels lately like there’s some kind of weird “iamverysmart” syndrome banging around on HN in particular - every single post mentioning COVID is full of these shallow armchair analyses that seem to think rejecting all prevailing wisdom is an inherent good. It’s totally possible to be critical of the global response and analyses of it without this honestly fucking weird assumption that everyone else except you is a mindless sheep.

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

#243

Post by anoncake » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

sterlind wrote: post #207

dabbledash wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I really worry about: that people are so risk averse and so invested in the COVID response that society is going to permanently become more cold, more closed off, and less human. 2020 life is no way to live long term, and I don’t even want to take a step in this direction. If I found out tomorrow that there would never be a cure or vaccine for COVID, I would just go back to living like I lived befor…

I sure hope that sick people continue to wear masks once this is all over. It's basic human decency to avoid spreading germs - even the flu - to others, especially elders. This is the norm in Asia. After COVID ends, I won't wear a mask if I'm healthy but I sure as hell will if I have a cough or fever.

You can cough and sneeze into a mask if you want. I think it's disgusting.

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

#244

Post by gridlockd » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

bonzini wrote: post #195

gridlockd wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Two things: first, you don't need every hospital to be overwhelmed for it to constitute an issue. Of course, but you need a significant amount of hospitals to be overwhelmed to cause significant excess death. Remember, we're trying to minimize excess death of all causes , not just COVID-19. > Second, every successful preemptive measure is by definition an overreaction. Perhaps you don't see more overwhelmed hospita…

Excess death in places where hospitals were overwhelmed (Lombardy, NYC, Madrid) was so many standard deviations above normal values that I am not even sure how we can be having this discussion. Sweden could be a special case, but Brazil literally had 0.1% of its population wiped out. In Manaus there were five time as many excess deaths as confirmed COVID deaths. If that's not healthcare collapsing I don't know what i…

> Excess death in places where hospitals were overwhelmed (Lombardy, NYC, Madrid) was so many standard deviations above normal values that I am not even sure how we can be having this discussion.

Sure, you may have very high excess death in a few areas, but unless you think people from New York are somehow more important than everyone else, all excess deaths must be weighted equally. Remember, we're trying to optimize for all-cause mortality across the entire country.

> Sweden could be a special case, but Brazil literally had 0.1% of its population wiped out.

Every year, Brazil loses 0.65% of its population to all-cause mortality. COVID-Mortality in Brazil may be high, but it is pretty much on par with Chile, which has had a severe lockdown.

> In Manaus there were five time as many excess deaths as confirmed COVID deaths. If that's not healthcare collapsing I don't know what it is.

Yes, for a brief period, hospitals in certain cities did indeed get overwhelmed. That's very visible.

What isn't visible is people that would suffer and die in the next years because their livelihoods were destroyed because of a lockdown of questionable efficacy.

In Chile, you have starving protestors clashing with the police. In Brazil, approval for Bolsonaro is at the highest since his presidency started. Put two and two together.

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

#245

Post by nwah1 » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

VMG wrote: post #220

NelsonMinar wrote: post #155

The author, John Ioannidis, is a discredited researcher on Covid-19. He and his Stanford colleages are responsible for a terribly written antibody study done back in March on residents of Santa Clara County. The statistics in that paper were egregiously bad and seem cooked to meet foregone political conclusions. Some reporting: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis... https://www.mercurynews.co…

"discredited" means stripped of his credentials?

It means some people didn't like what he said, so now this eminent researcher is not to be trusted again until he says something they like.

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

#246

Post by __blockcipher__ » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:42 PM UTC

supernovae wrote: post #240

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not as if we decided out of thin air the virus was dangerous. But this is kind of exactly what we did. Go look at a yearly all-cause mortality chart going back the last 110 years. You’ll see this year is a noticeable but not so great uptick (of which many of the deaths will be overdoses, suicides, lack of medical treatment for preventable diseases etc btw). Whereas say the 1918 Flu pandemic was much more deadl…

In the worst flu seasons we have 50k people die. In the easiest flu seasons we have 3k people die. So if you take the worst flu season - which we count as a year - we're almost 5x that with covid and its not even a full year yet... If you take the best flu year, we're pushing 100x that. Where are we over estimating anything when we break it down into simple terms? Which btw, these current death rates are with active…

> Which btw, these current death rates are with active measures in place. If we didn't have these measures then the trends set early on would be off the charts by now.

Sweden contradicts this.

> So if you take the worst flu season - which we count as a year - we're almost 5x that with covid and its not even a full year yet...

The way we count COVID deaths is fundamentally different from how we count Flu deaths.

It's much better to look at total deaths and compare to previous years. You'll see we've experienced an uptick this year but not one that is nearly as massive as you would predict based off the hysteria

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

#247

Post by syncmaster913n » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

wedn3sday wrote: post #149

moralsupply wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a "causal nexus" is not accepted in any law system (natural or positive). The fact something can happen due to your actions can't be used as an ethical argument to limit your freedom of action. From the perspective of individual freedoms the ban of guns is unacceptable under the pretense they might end up harming others by chance; if that's the case, the police and the military themselves shouldn't have g…

Yes, this is why there are so many shooting deaths in the UK, because they have strict gun control laws /s. I see this argument all the time from otherwise intelligent people and its amazing to me. Why bother making murder illegal? It will only stop law abiding people from killing anyone, and criminals will still murder people! Yes I know this is a reducto fallacy, however the argument you're making is fundamentally…

Not up to date on the gun control issues in the U.S., but just wanted to comment on this:

> Why bother making murder illegal?

I think having consequences for murder is very different from restricting someone's freedom.

My freedom is not infringed on by the fact that murder is illegal. Why? Because I can still go out and murder someone (not that I would, lol - just making a point). Totally up to me. Feel like murdering someone today? I just go out and do it.

The "restricted freedom" version of outlawing murder would be if my hands were cuffed behind my back every time I left my house, just so I wouldn't be able to murder someone if I felt like it.

I hope I'm getting my message across (not a native speaker). My point is that, to me, there's an ocean of difference between forcing me to do something in order to prevent me from possibly doing X (no matter how likely / unlikely it is that I would do it), and having consequences in place for actually doing X. The former is a violation of my freedom; the latter is justice.

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

#248

Post by bleepblorp » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

moralsupply wrote: post #172

bleepblorp wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase Charles Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an answer. Might I suggest that you take advantage of open course syllabi from a major college/university and do some undergraduate readings on the history and moral foundations of law? There is far more to philosophy and jurisprudence than Ayn Rand.

I'm not sure why would you mention Ayn Rand in this context. Since you proposed some studying, here are a few books on the subject that I'd suggest to you: Lysander Spooner, No Treason The Constitution of No Authority https://oll-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/2194/Spooner_1... Frédéric Bastiat, The Law https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44800 Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty https://mises.org/library/ethic…

I think you might find The Road to Serfdom interesting:

http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files...

There's a long tradition of the notion of collective responsibility in conservative thought. Even Hayek agreed with this.

Stuff like Spooner and Rothbard is very much fringe and likely would have no audience if not for heavy promotion by Koch-like entities.

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

#249

Post by mindslight » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

moralsupply wrote: post #104

hef19898 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stories like this are the reason for all the social disrancing measures and work from home. Not everybody can follow this of course. But those jobs that can be done from home should be done from home. And social distancing should be followed as much as possible. Sadly, people have to be forced to do so it seems.

The only really sad thing is that so many people believe others should be forced (through the use of the monopoly of force the state holds) to do whatever they believe is "right"

The state is forcing people to go to work so much in the first place, via the debt treadmill. If most people were allowed to accumulate savings, and so could take time off without losing the roof over their heads, then it would make sense to talk in terms of voluntary choices.

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

#250

Post by notahacker » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

petertodd wrote: post #192

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is trivially disproven by the excess mortality figures from earlier in the year. By the start of the Summer the UK had around 60,000 excess deaths above the five year median - which included at least one fairly severe flu season. Later in the Summer when lockdown was still in place and/or infection rates were still very controlled, the number of excess deaths dipped slightly below the median - as you would expec…

> COVID is the only remotely plausible explanation for those excess deaths. I personally know someone whose father likely died due to being unable to access health care in a timely fashion, as well as someone else who died of cancer after their chemotherapy was postponed. And I also know of two suicides in my extended social group in the past few months. It's tough to pin specific blame on lockdown for things like th…

> I personally know someone whose father likely died due to being unable to access health care in a timely fashion, as well as someone else who died of cancer after their chemotherapy was postponed. And I also know of two suicides in my extended social group in the past few months. It's tough to pin specific blame on lockdown for things like that. But it's certainly plausible that deaths like that would lead to excess deaths.

Sure, but we can look at when the excess deaths happened. Instead of being evenly distributed across the lockdown period, or peaking towards the end when people had longer without access to support, they came exactly when you'd expect deaths from an epidemic wave to peak before plummeting to normal levels towards the end of the lockdown period. Undoubtedly, individual deaths have resulted from lockdown, but the pattern of excess deaths matches COVID rather than lockdown being behind the aggregate increase.