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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]

#351

Post by watwut »

Izkata wrote: post #315
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…

When it comes to hospitalizations and fatality rates, people are talking past each other by only looking at part of the picture. The two main camps I see are: 1) Covid19 is far more deadly, look at all these excess deaths! 2) The IFR is low, about the same as the seasonal flu, so we really didn't need the lockdowns. Both are half true. Basically, we have decent herd immunity for existing viruses. Even with an identic…

But IFR are not identical. That part is simply lie. It is not just taking part each other.

Seasonal flu has also much different spreading. You are spreading it for very short time and then you get clearly sick. Which makes limiting speed much easier.

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

#352

Post by unishark »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #289
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?

The irony is remarkable.

Technically it would be consistency not irony.

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

#353

Post by unishark »

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…

It's a widespread problem in science:

https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on...

A domain where results are easily reproducible is settled science, and not what people are researching anymore. Every field moves on till they get stuck on problem areas that hinder progress. Kind of a Peter principle for research. And what's worse, bad studies act as a hindrance since they make an unsolved question look like settled science, and you can't get support for pursuing a competing hypothesis.

And epidemiology seems really complex to me. Every person is unique in many ways and behaving based on effects stretching back over their entire lives.

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

#354

Post by anoncake »

ficklepickle wrote: post #258
anoncake wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My elbow hasn't complained so far.

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

#355

Post by anoncake »

ceejayoz wrote: post #267
aga98mtl wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that there has been tens of millions of people with a covid infection, where are these people with chronic symptoms?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02598-6 > Symptoms might take a long time to fade; a study posted on the preprint server medRxiv in August followed up on people who had been hospitalized, and found that even a month after being discharged, more than 70% were reporting shortness of breath and 13.5% were still using oxygen at home. > One study of 143 people with COVID-19 discharged from a hospital in Rome fo…

After 1 month, 70% report shortness of breath. After 2 months, 43% and after 3 months, we're down to 25%. People are clearly recovering.

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

#356

Post by notahacker »

petertodd wrote: post #328
notahacker wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exces…

...but why would excess lockdown deaths happen in a uniformly distributed way? Lockdown itself wasn't applied in a uniform fashion: hospitals figured out pretty quickly that lack of care was killing people and modified policies to mitigate that damage. My own advice to friends and family was "probably best not to go to the hospital for that" in March, and back to normal in April when I realized that the numbers weren…

> ...but why would excess lockdown deaths happen in a uniformly distributed way?

No, the question is why does the excess deaths distribution perfectly align with the expected and recorded COVID death spike and drop so sharply afterwards when lockdown was still in place.

It's uncontroversial that lockdown has killed and saved significant numbers of people for reasons other than COVID, but similarly it is entirely uncontroversial that the aggregate increase in excess deaths was caused by COVID. The idea that the inflection point COVID-time-to-death days after the start of lockdown is better explained by unannounced changes in policy or your personal advice to friends and family, on the other hand is about as scientifically credible as blaming 5G.

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

#357

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

just-juan-post wrote: post #241
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?

Those numbers are entirely different.

The 750mn cases is an estimate based on seroprevalence studies. The 1mn deaths are based on deaths following a positive PCR test. A more appropriate comparison is 1mn deaths over 35mn cases, leading to a CFR of over 2%.

Odd how no one ever quotes that number.

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

#358

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

nradov wrote: post #301
beagle3 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, it's a statistical artefact caused by testing policies.

In March, you needed multiple symptoms to get a test, which meant that conditional on having a test, your illness was much more serious.

Because this isn't an issue right now, it looks like the mortality rates have dropped when it's more likely that we are capturing a larger proportion of mild cases.

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

#359

Post by mrb »

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»

Without lockdowns these people would probably not have been able to access health care either, because of, well, the pandemic.

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

#360

Post by bart_spoon »

supernovae wrote: post #333
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Search for the news right now and you will see their cases are increasing and they're dealing with trying to control it.

This applies to all of Europe though. Places like France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy are all seeing skyrocketing daily cases.

From what I remember, it’s not that Sweden didn’t encourage mask wearing or social distancing, it just didn’t make anything mandatory, and it didn’t enforce any lockdowns. It hasn’t particularly saved their economy from any damage, although it didn’t seem to cause them to have rates of infection or deaths to get much worse than the average in Europe, and their hospitals didn’t get overwhelmed.

If anything, it seems to demonstrate that the idea that avoiding lockdowns will save the economy isn’t realistic, and the economy, but lockdowns aren’t going to help much either.

At this point it seems like all anyone can do is wear a mask, do what you can to socially distance while living a relatively normal life, and wait for either a vaccine or the pandemic to pass its course.

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