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Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

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Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#221

Post by _y5hn »

Barrin92 wrote: post #158
joe_the_user wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a meta-study looking at over 67 papers that address the question of the spread of respiratory viruses. Obviously, every virus is a new virus, that is always a problem. Yeah, and if any of those other viruses caused a world wide pandemic, I missed it. The article is a specious disaster. Why do we treat the virus like a black swan event, but not the unprecedented response of shutting economic and civil liberty dow…

>Yeah, and if any of those other viruses caused a world wide pandemic, I missed it. They do actually. Several of the outbreaks studied among the papers were influenza pandemics, coronavirus pandemics, and SARS. (page ~110-120) This rhetoric you're starting here about bringing out the war drums to fight invisible enemies is exactly what Ioannidis is afraid of. It is not scientific, it is not based on evidence, and it…

Bogus wars against viruses would've been totally unnecessary if leaders had prepared for this eventuality and not shutting down long-term preparedness. Look at this as payback with interest to that debt. Waiting for evidence would lead to worse handling, and shut everything down during panic time instead. Ensuring even worse outcomes.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#222

Post by robocat »

antpls wrote: post #189
jamilbk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree with you, but I want to see more data. Without broad testing it’s difficult to ascertain the true death rate of the virus (many infected are asymptomatic). But my hope is we can come up with similarly effective measures (e.g. require n95 masks in public, keeping the elderly at home, offer voluntary isolated infection to low-risk individuals to increase herd immunity, etc) that can achieve both.

For the record, in March 2018, 58 000 people died in Italy. We will see how many died this March 2020 : http://demo.istat.it/index_e.html (see green section on the right, By Month) Also the following study from August 2019 (before covid19) shows that Italy has more deaths due to influenza every year than any other EU country : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...

> shows that Italy has more deaths due to influenza every year than any other EU country

I’ve read that if an elderly person dies in Italy while they have the flu or coronavirus, then that is recorded as the cause of death.

Some other countries put down other reasons like diabetes complications, or heart failure. Possibly due to pressure from insurance, or avoiding liability for iatrogenic diseases, or avoiding KPIs targeting lower death rates for infections in hospitals.

You are jumping to conclusions based on a few numbers, without understanding the background of where those numbers come from or how to validly compare them between countries.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#223

Post by cma »

robocat wrote: post #84

Firstly, there is 10 weeks of evidence on what other countries have done to avoid transmission. Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, China, and Japan all show a variety of strategies and have some successes under their belts. Sure, it’s messy social data, and they have systematic differences from other countries, but it’s real data about what is working. Ioannidis says: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individual…

Ioannidis even questions if ventilators are helping. He basically says without evidence to the contrary, they may be a placebo (the part about ICU beds).

And all the low CFRs he cherry picked have now increased dramatically.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#224

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

joe_the_user wrote: post #181
Barrin92 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, and if any of those other viruses caused a world wide pandemic, I missed it. They do actually. Several of the outbreaks studied among the papers were influenza pandemics, coronavirus pandemics, and SARS. (page ~110-120) This rhetoric you're starting here about bringing out the war drums to fight invisible enemies is exactly what Ioannidis is afraid of. It is not scientific, it is not based on evidence, and it…

This rhetoric you're starting here about bringing out the war drums to fight invisible enemies is exactly what Ioannidis is afraid of. It is not scientific, it is not based on evidence, and it does not, weigh the tail risk of a global economic breakdown. Science is a means of discovering the most likely state of things and an always uncertain one. Other human institutions have to come into play when it is necessary t…

But the government isn't aiming to keep the productive machinery going as much as possible. They're doing precisely the opposite, shutting down productive machinery as much as possible.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#225

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #165
Barrin92 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, and if any of those other viruses caused a world wide pandemic, I missed it. They do actually. Several of the outbreaks studied among the papers were influenza pandemics, coronavirus pandemics, and SARS. (page ~110-120) This rhetoric you're starting here about bringing out the war drums to fight invisible enemies is exactly what Ioannidis is afraid of. It is not scientific, it is not based on evidence, and it…

Doesn’t influenzas cause a pandemic every year? I’ve read from various sources influenza cause multiple hundred-thousand deaths every year.

That's broadly correct, although most definitions of "pandemic" jump through some hoop or another to make seasonal flu not count.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#226

Post by jeltz »

mikeyouse wrote: post #51
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the US CDC has said this about (H1N1)pdm09. I'm not sure if H1N1 is a coronavirus though and I don't know if there's any published research supporting this. But the author's statement seems reasonable enough given it was qualified with "probably". > From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (range: 195,0…

Nope - MERS and SARS were the only large Coronavirus outbreaks. H1N1 is an Influenza A strain (similar to the so-called Spanish Flu).

That is untrue. There are coronavirus outbreaks all the time. What makes MERS and SARS special is that they are the only known human coronviruses with high mortality.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#227

Post by dnautics »

divbzero wrote: post #194
robocat wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~0.3 and ~0.9% are also not optimistic guesses but the current numbers for Germany and SK. Fine numbers in the presence of a health system that is not overloaded, or a country that has managed to make effective changes to prevent transmission (how did they do that without science huh?) By John’s numbers (0.3% die and 1% of population) Italy should get a total of 1800 deaths. Yet Italy is at 6000 and rapidly rising -…

> By John’s numbers (0.3% die and 1% of population) Italy should get a total of 1800 deaths. Yet Italy is at 6000 and rapidly rising - using real numbers his assumptions are already wrong for a first world country that is a few weeks ahead of the rest of the world. Just highlighting this bit of the parent’s post. If you want hard evidence that COVID-19 is quantitatively and qualitatively different from other coronavi…

It's also possible that Italy is vastly unlucky for some generic reason, considering most of the deaths are in a particular region of the country and among an age bracket that is less cosmopolitan and more likely to reflect limited geographic genetic dispersion.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#228

Post by antpls »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #219
antpls wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the charts? If you didn't know there is a global epidemic, would you have been able to see it on these curves? In France and Italy, there were between 50000 and 60000 deaths per month in 2018 and 2019. If most of those people died because of 2 or 3 accumulated factors, covid19 would be just one more factor. But maybe those people would have died one month later anyway without covid19

I don't understand people like you who can look at the current numbers and say "Oh, it's not so bad" while also conveniently ignoring that the numbers are growing exponentially. People that are raising the alarm are not talking about the numbers now, they are talking about the numbers in the future if nothing is done to address it.

This is a new virus, _no one_ knows about the future. Data we have now could be biased toward an hidden variable we didn't figure out yet.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#229

Post by listsfrin »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #162
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corvid 19 deaths are doubling every 3 days in US and a few other countries. Do the extrapolation.

Trillions will die. You can only extrapolate so far.

People seem like computers these days: they only think in logarithms, they "forget" to add some common sense.

Re: Covid-19: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures

#230

Post by cycrutchfield »

antpls wrote: post #228
cycrutchfield wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand people like you who can look at the current numbers and say "Oh, it's not so bad" while also conveniently ignoring that the numbers are growing exponentially. People that are raising the alarm are not talking about the numbers now, they are talking about the numbers in the future if nothing is done to address it.

This is a new virus, _no one_ knows about the future. Data we have now could be biased toward an hidden variable we didn't figure out yet.

Well, why don't we just wait around and sit on our hands until hundreds of thousands are dead and this hidden variable makes its presence known? Sounds like a winning strategy to me.
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