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

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

#251

Post by nwah1 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #232
ajb wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, is that the same John Ioannidis who wrote "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", pretty much the most influential paper on statistical error for the last 50 years?

Yes it is and that doesn't make his current fraudulent shenanigans any better. It makes them more disheartening, however. I'm not an expert in the replication crisis but I have to say that as a conceptual framework, it has the problem of pointing a finger at all research - saying "Most Published Research" etc, when the replication crisis is quite concentrated in experimental psychology , complex biomedical causation…

How is reporting an IFR you disagree with the same as denying germ theory?

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

#252

Post by sjg007 »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #147
nradov wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was always a risk even before COVID-19. Regular seasonal influenza can be deadly, especially to the elderly. Patients can transmit it to others when they are asymptomatic or presymptomatic. COVID-19 has a longer incubation period and a significantly higher fatality rate but the same fundamentals still apply. Any of us could have inadvertently killed someone by giving them the flu without even realizing it.

This is all true, but COVID hysteria has taken hold across the entire world, and HN is no exception unfortunately. You are being reflexively down voted because people view any comparison to Influenza as illegitimate, not realizing that you are making a broader point about risk management and attribution of blame for infection as opposed to saying that SARS-2 and Influenza are literally the same viruses. Personally I…

Wear a mask and stay 6 feet away.

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

#253

Post by [deleted] »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #246
supernovae wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#254

Post by ikeboy »

rossdavidh wrote: post #2

For comparison, from what I've read the typical annual influenza fatality rate is around 0.1% (don't know what the under-70 rate would be). So, this puts covid-19 solidly in the uncanny valley of viral mortality rates; not low enough to be "just like a flu", not high enough to justify shutting down the world. No wonder opinions on it are so divided.

The flu also affects older people more. If you compare flu IFR to COVID by the same age group, covid is more dangerous across all age groups.

(I did the math myself using CDC estimates for both the flu and covid and assuming a 50% asymptomatic rate for the flu.)

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

#255

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

rossdavidh wrote: post #233
SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you need to look is not fatality rate, but total fatalities caused by the disease. Flu kills 60000 a year max in US, Covid kills 5x that number. And it is unclear what will be a fatality rate for younger people whose organs are damaged by previous infection.

Well, the 2017 flu was a little over 60,000, but it was close to 60k, so we could say that, but the 1968 and 1957 flus were worse than that. Covid-19 isn't to 300,000 (5x 60k) yet, but I suppose it could get there. However, the idea of organs damaged, resulting in future fatalities, is not just "unclear". We could speculate the same about almost any virus, or for that matter any vaccine. Until time has passed, we won…

> Until time has passed, we won't know, but at this point neither northern Italy nor any other region that had early waves of Covid-19 have reported any such problem in even 1% of cases

Did they actually do any monitoring and reporting? There is aplenty of people around with long Covid, I know personally one guy, who was actually diagnosed with myocarditis he never had before.

> We haven't in fact seen anything that suggests a widespread problem in people who recover from covid-19, and given past results with SARS, MERS,

Actually lots and lots SARS survivors did develop long-term problems. Besides, experiments on animals show, both SARS-1 and MERS caused very severe Antigen-dependent enhancement, which made the attempt to produce a vaccine futile. Not many viruses are capable of doing this, mostly flavivuruses and betacoronaviruses.

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

#256

Post by joe_the_user »

nwah1 wrote: post #251
joe_the_user wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is and that doesn't make his current fraudulent shenanigans any better. It makes them more disheartening, however. I'm not an expert in the replication crisis but I have to say that as a conceptual framework, it has the problem of pointing a finger at all research - saying "Most Published Research" etc, when the replication crisis is quite concentrated in experimental psychology , complex biomedical causation…

How is reporting an IFR you disagree with the same as denying germ theory?

I didn't say Ioannidis denied germ theory. What I implied was that he seems to put findings based on germ theory in the same category as the often/generally false/debatable findings of experimental psychology. Then he publishes findings based on completely selective uses of data, apparently with the attitude "nothing is true, I'll take the truth I like".

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

#257

Post by nate_meurer »

noja wrote: post #129
nate_meurer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, IFR is the infection fatality rate. It's the number of fatalities divided by the number of infections. If you reduce the infection rate, the proportion of those infections that results in death will not change. This of course doesn't apply if healthcare systems are overwhelmed, but that's not what we're talking about here.

We don't test for who has flu.

> We don't test for who has flu.

What? Of course we do. Influenza rapid tests are among the most common diagnostics during flu season. Epidemiologists rely on these tests as well as serological surveillance to derive IFR estimates for the various flu bugs, just as they do for covid.

But it doesn't matter. Your assertion was that flu and covid IFR's are "apples to oranges" because we're taking measures to reduce covid infections. This is nonsense on the simplest logical level. Reducing the infection rate doesn't reduce the danger to the individuals who do get infected, as long as the standard of care remains stable.

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

#258

Post by ficklepickle »

anoncake wrote: post #243
sterlind wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More or less disgusting than coughing and sneezing all over everyone around you?

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

#259

Post by lemming »

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…

Here in New Zealand where very few people died of COVID, overall mortality dropped significantly during lockdown. This seems to have mostly been due to a lack of traffic deaths, air pollution improvements, as well as a massive reduction in non-COVID respiratory illnesses. This article actually posits a reduced number of complications from elective surgeries as a factor in the reduced death rate: https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/pubhealthexpert/2020/07/10/weekly-...:

For example, around 40% of Wellington ICU patients are typically from elective procedures and around 10% of all Wellington ICU patients die.

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

#260

Post by Mountain_Skies »

mkolodny wrote: post #226
butthewho wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a peer-reviewed article published by the World Health Organization, not a press release from an individual Stanford lab. Could you please enumerate your specific concerns with this study?

My main concern with this study is that it uses reported Covid-19 deaths to infer the fatality rate. According to the paper, the fatality rates in the US are far higher than the rates in China and India. While the inferred fatality rate in the US is as high as ~1.3% (Louisiana), in many other places like China outside Wuhan and in India, the inferred death rate is close to 0.0%. I highly doubt that's actually the cas…

Speaking of Pakistan, a friend who is a pediatrician there said that childhood vaccinations have declined by 50% since the start of the pandemic, possibly because parents are too scared to go to a medical facility to have it done out of concern of being infected by covid19. The secondary impacts from the pandemic and our response are going to start becoming more apparent.
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