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...
Do people in Mumbai get Covid-19 positivity tests for free? If not, then I'd be surprised if all of the 18 million people in Mumbai have been able to afford them.
Did you read the article? They gave free tests to a random sample of Mumbai residents.
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…
Are there accessible data on this? From where I'm standing now in the US, coverage about the pandemic has basically halted.
I mean, there are superficial articles referencing the pandemic all of the time despite with some inappropriate decline in mainstream news. There is nothing (besides HN?) that seems to be tracking the research closely.
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…
Sweden doesn't contradict anything. Search for the news right now and you will see their cases are increasing and they're dealing with trying to control it.
Really, the only hysteria there is, is from people like you projecting it.
Wearing a mask and socially distancing is rational.
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…
The seroprevalence study was indeed awful, but this isn't so remarkable on its own. Bad science gets published all the time.
The emails suggesting a foregone conclusion make Ioannidis look even worse.
Nonetheless, the work stands on its own and should be evaluated as such. You would be forgiven for going in with the prior that Ioannidis has a poor track record in this area - but your prior alone is not enough to dismiss the work.
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…
Would data about excess death vs COVID death prove the matter?
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…
The seroprevalence study was indeed awful, but this isn't so remarkable on its own. Bad science gets published all the time. The emails suggesting a foregone conclusion make Ioannidis look even worse. Nonetheless, the work stands on its own and should be evaluated as such. You would be forgiven for going in with the prior that Ioannidis has a poor track record in this area - but your prior alone is not enough to dism…
Science isn't a matter of simple data. Science is a matter of trust. A scientific cannot "stand on it's own" without the assurance that it was produced by someone with a minimal amount of integrity. There are too many elements in the process of research that can be "fudged" to allow this.
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…
Certainly in my county, many fewer people are dying even though many more are testing positive. Many more people are getting tested, for job requirements, travel, etc. It results in more positives, naturally. In a county of more than 3 million, we have around 50 in ICU, lowest in many months. As positive tests grow. Two things (at least) might be at work: better treatment is one, the other is that there were far higher numbers of people infected than known, earlier in the year. I’m sure treatment now is better, but I would not be surprised if many more people have been exposed, and have recovered, from this virus than is assumed.
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…
If you look at China, but omit Wuhan, then wouldn’t the better comparison be to the U.S., omitting Louisiana? Why take the highest region in the U.S., and compare to another country while specifically omitting the highest region there?
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?
When exactly did our societies became so cuddly, childish, weak and pathetic to even ask these questions? How would this society fight any large scale war? Or make any large scale sacrifice like people fixing up consequences of Chernobyl disaster did? People used to rather die for honor, than live in shame. Had duels, took risky lifestyles, discovering new things and so on. Fought and died for their ideas. And now wh…
> Or make any large scale sacrifice
Sacrifice is exactly what people aren't doing and why we're living through this disaster.
The sacrifice we should be looking at is not the risk of catching COVID-19. It's that of following a set of rules that drastically minimize the spread of the disease. Simple rules, by the way.
If everyone had the kind of thinking some (most?) Asian societies have (collective first, individual second), we'd be looking at a much different world right now. I'm thinking mainly of Taiwan.
But no, we have to deal with people throwing tantrums because they can't wear a piece of cloth over their faces.
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…
>Personally I find it fascinating that I was never told it was my fault if I gave someone the flu in the course of both of us living our normal lives, but if I go to a grocery store and an elderly person does too and they get COVID-19 from me (imagine in this hypothetical there is no doubt that I gave them the virus) then somehow it’s my fault and I’m guilty of any harm that befalls then.
You ignore an important factor. Those who are vulnerable to serious complications/death from influenza can and should be inoculated with the latest influenza vaccine. That significantly mitigates the risk for the vulnerable.
There is no corresponding vaccine for Sars-Cov2. As such, the similar group who are vulnerable can't mitigate the risk.
That's why I (and many others) are trying to be much more careful. I'd also add that while the IFR for those under 55 are quite low, they aren't zero.