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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]

#281
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, according to https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v... (table 3) its probably just a bit over 0.06% for 40 year olds.

In context - this is less for you than for the "COVID is no big deal" folks - that's 5x the annual likelihood of a 40-year-old dying in a car crash in the United States, and about 60x the likelihood of a 40-year-old dying of the swine flu during the 2009 epidemic. So COVID is in fact very dangerous for 40-year-olds. Pose a thought experiment: if someone said "would you go out drinking with your friends tonight if the…

I confront people who think they'll be ok because "the fatality rate for my age is only, like, 0.1%" with this question:

You would play the lottery with those odds, wouldn't you? But you don't want to play that lottery.

People don't realize how high odds of 1 in a 1000 are until you flip it around like that.

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

#282

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…

Indeed. The Economist recently analyzed excess deaths data and concluded the true number of COVID-19 deaths is likely about twice higher as of September, or about 2M: https://mobile.twitter.com/JamesFransham/status/130956007032...

In any case we know India and Brazil (2nd and 3rd country with highest death toll) are underreporting deaths: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2859 and https://mobile.twitter.com/muradbanaji/status/12844812155635...

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

#283
post #251

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?

He first reported an IFR estimate that was lower than New York's total state-wide fatality rate (amongst all population, not just infected), and did it with a pretty explicit agenda if you read his opinion piece from before the study.

Several articles revealed conflicts of interest behind the study such as the CEO of Jet Blue promising lab funding for someone who didn't want their name on the study if they would sign on, or something roughly along those lines (maybe with another layer of indirection).

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Suicides, hunger + starvation due, cancers and other diseases or illnesses not caught early, domestic abuse incidents, civil unrest (people get antsy when they have nothing to do). I'd say they are already pretty apparent, people are just fine to have their heads in the sand.

Sounds like we need to restructure our social safety nets in America to prevent hunger + starvation and make sure people get the health care they need regardless of their ability to pay.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

It's not as simple as that. Early on, people with low blood oxygen were put on ventilators quickly, which both took a great toll on the system, and didn't help (or even made things worse). If you look at the graphs now (I looked at 30 countries just an hour ago), you'll see that many countries in Europe have a very visible "second wave", including Denmark, Austria, the UK, France, Spain and even Sweden - but almost n…

It's not as simple as that.

I don't know about that. Everything you say is reasonable and not at all an example of the effect I was talking about.

It's totally fine to say "hey it looks like the CFR/IFR is declining because we have better treatment methods". This is a good-faith point, backed up by some easily observable data, and something that can evolve into a discussion about how to effectively manage the disease. It's not a point that I've heard any rational person object to.

It is worth noting though – the UK, as an example, currently already has about 30% of the cases in hospital versus the peak in late April, and about 15% of the deaths. This is much better, but those numbers are increasing pretty rapidly and without careful management risks getting out of control.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daily reminder: new respitory diseases come and go, nobody usually cares. What makes Covid different and what caused the shutdowns was when Lombardy alone had 450 deaths a day. No regular influenza could do that. It's not as if we decided out of thin air the virus was dangerous.

That's not happening anymore. Time to be adults, instead of terrified children, and find alternatives to lockdowns and mask-shaming with the occasional assault, and arrests from local governments.

>and find alternatives to lockdowns and mask-shaming with the occasional assault

assault for wearing masks, or failing to wear masks? I'm only aware of the former.

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you mean that all libertarians are "very much fringe" and "Kock-like entities"?

Also, Hayek was not a collectivist. Maybe you should read The Road to Serfdom again, as he refers to "collective responsibility" in the localist sense of "collective", not in the sense of a government.

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

#289
post #225

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…

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?

The irony is remarkable.

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

#290
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes far beyond masks. No hugging. No shaking hands. No singing. No bars. Masks and plexiglass for kids who are lucky enough to actually get school. Not having funerals for the dead. We can put up with these things in the short term to protect the vulnerable, and you’re right that people’s concern for others speaks well of them. But the logic some people use to support these things veers into territory where it so…

>But the logic some people use to support these things veers into territory where it sounds like they would be willing to make (or demand) any sacrifice for literally any increase in safety. I worry about how that will play out long term. Seems like you're strawmanning/shifting the goalposts, considering your initial comment says "I would just go back to living like I lived before", which would suggest you would take…

Yeah, I think that was an overstatement of my position and unnecessarily provocative.

I probably would mostly go back though. Overall, I’d rather accept a more dangerous world with normal human contact than continue the kind of things we’re doing now indefinitely. But I’m sure I’d be more cautious about visiting a nursing home than I was pre-Covid. I’d be a lot more likely to isolate at the first sign of a fever than I used to be. I’d wear a mask when I’m sick. But I’d probably stop avoiding gatherings, masking when I’m well etc.

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