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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]

#301

Post by nradov »

beagle3 wrote: post #262
matthewmacleod wrote: post #242

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…

As ghoulish as it may seem, I suspect another reason behind the declining fatality rate is that the earlier waves already killed some of the most vulnerable people.

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

#302

Post by woofie11 »

ColanR wrote: post #162
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…

I'm interested, but it seems like you'll need more than buzzfeed news as a source if you're claiming that Stanford scientists are unreliable.

Curiously, Stanford excels at poor research methodology these days, with MIT a close second. It turns out that faculty positions are competitive enough at the elites that few make it in without cheating. There has been a steady decline in research integrity (with a parallel incline in research impact) as competition went up.

I'm not sure what to do about it. I know MIT better than Stanford, and fixing the culture would involve firing a big chunk of the faculty. You can't fire tenured faculty, even if you could get people to acknowledge the problem.

Integrity at 2nd and 3rd tier schools is still a lot higher, but we do need to fix incentive structures, or the rot will take over academia.

Softer disciplines (like social sciences) are way ahead of harder disciplines like CS on the rot curve. In CS, it's a lot harder to bake data.

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

#303

Post by dpc_pw »

cblum wrote: post #281
ojnabieoot wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I take that bet. Easily. 1/ 1000? Ha! Anytime. If it means my kids can go to school, economy doesn't have to crash hard and I don't have to waste a year or more of my life, it's an obvious choice.

1 year is ~1.25% of my life that I will not get back no matter what.

Now, anyone is free to stay in their pod and eat bugs, if they're scared.

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

#304

Post by onecommentman »

rndgermandude wrote: post #32
morsch wrote: post #16

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…

>This isn't good news, really, not for middle-aged-adults anyway. Or for anybody who knows middle aged and older people, especially if you spend time with them. I am honestly more concerned about killing my parents than dying myself of covid-19. This is why I skipped my mom's birthday for example, because I had pretty mild cold-like symptoms... or maybe mild covid-19.

BTW, for those substantially younger than dirt. You may be wondering why your elder elders aren’t particularly frightened by this, but folks 40 to 60 are more sensitized.

After a certain age momento mori, a reminder that you will die, start coming at you fast and furious. This is just one more. They probably care more about seeing you than this next scheduled flight to Heaven.

What unique about the shutdowns and social isolation, for the 40s-60s, are this is a momento senesci (if I have the Latin right). It’s a reminder that they will mostly likely enter a stage in life called old age, the slo-go/no-go stage of old age. A time when there will be fewer friends to visit, or the logistics become too difficult. A time when they will stay at home much more, and wouldn’t it be nice to have a comfortable home to be in. A time when that next flu won’t be so easy to shake, so maybe they skip that concert. The grim reaper isn’t knocking at the door, but rather an older, frailer version of themselves. These shutdowns and social distancing are a disconcerting trial run.

My take on things...

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

#305

Post by bhk »

SummerlyMars wrote: post #292
just-juan-post wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where are you getting 750m cases from? Their own dashboard only shows 35m. https://covid19.who.int/

Probably referring to this:

https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-archive-united-nat...

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

#306

Post by nradov »

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…

Researchers in India conducted an antibody seroprevalence study of poor people in Mumbai and calculated a fatality rate under 0.1%. The tests were free, subjects didn't have to pay anything.

https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/coronavirus/news/sero-su...

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

#307

Post by marcell »

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…

Can you summarize the objections? I skimmed the BuzzFeed article and it is very long, filled with vague innuendo. I couldn’t find any argument on the merits.

Similarly your post is an ad hominem, but you didn’t make any arguments based on merits.

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

#308

Post by defen »

dpc_pw wrote: post #303
cblum wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I take that bet. Easily. 1/ 1000? Ha! Anytime. If it means my kids can go to school, economy doesn't have to crash hard and I don't have to waste a year or more of my life, it's an obvious choice. 1 year is ~1.25% of my life that I will not get back no matter what. Now, anyone is free to stay in their pod and eat bugs, if they're scared.

Make a list of 20 ~40 year olds you know. Are you ok with there being a 2% chance that at least one of them dies of COVID?

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

#309

Post by cma »

nwah1 wrote: post #300
cma wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think, as mentioned here in the comments, his IFR estimate could be off by a factor of 2 or 3, but given that when he made his Santa Clara study, people were still worried about vastly higher fatality rates, he was still likely closer in absolute terms than many others. If he says the IFR is 0.27% and it is really 0.6% that is only off by 0.33. Anyone who thought it was 1.5% or 3% would've been off by a much higher…

I'd have to go back and look, but his initial publication, hyped by him and team in the media before peer review, had the upper bound below 0.27% and below the then-current state-wide fatality rate of New York.

> his IFR estimate could be off by a factor of 2 or 3,

His early opinion piece I think opined it might be as low as 0.05%, when we had very good reason to believe that not to be the case:

> That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.

> Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such “mild” coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

He was one of the big sources of credibility for people that extrapolated that to "just a normal flu".

> If he says the IFR is 0.27% and it is really 0.6% that is only off by 0.33. Anyone who thought it was 1.5% or 3% would've been off by a much higher amount.

Remember he was against most actions at the worst time for people being unprepared and hospitals potentially getting overwhelmed. IFR would increase with overwhelmed hospitals and without the time we've bought to develop better treatments and protocols.

There was lots of fishy stuff going on with the later seropositivity study:

Sample bias: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis...

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

#310

Post by chillwaves »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #294
chillwaves wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what you got from this? An opportunity to inject a political talking point? People are afraid to go into a hospital. From March until September (for some states), people were being turned away because their routine screenings and exams were not seen as essential. Screenings and exams that can catch lumps, polyps, etc. Routine medical care is down across the board. Dental health is suffering. For food, global s…

COVID isn't the only barrier to access to health care.

> There isn't a social safety net in the world you could construct to suddenly handle millions going out of work because of lockdowns.

I disagree. Seems easily doable, given the wealth and capacity of the country. Just a matter of political will.

Why have other countries managed to take care of their workers? Maybe we can ask Canada for pointers?

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