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

1. That isn't the point that was being made. Matthew McCleod argued that "we don't regularly have ICUs stuffed full of people with influenza", and that HN is full of people who reject the "prevailing wisdom" just for the sake of it. Neither is the case, and my post provides plenty of evidence to reject the belief about hospitals (which is driven by media stories not actual overload - in the UK hospitals are being reported as about to overflow although they have normal load for this time of year, i.e. the reports are misleading).

2. Your data is comparing apples and oranges. Nowhere has ever made the kind of testing effort being made for COVID. We really have no idea how many people catch or die from flu because it's not really tracked to the same level of effort. Meanwhile COVID reporting has been hopelessly inflated by a medical establishment that takes every option to increase reported numbers. People are "COVID hospitalisations" if they're admitted with a broken arm and happen to test positive even though they don't seem to be sick, they are "COVID deaths" if they get shot and test positive at time of death. They have "COVID" the disease even if no doctor ever diagnosed them based purely on fragments of RNA found in a blood sample, using a test with unknown and it seems wildly varying false positive rates, that's been ramped up well beyond the max sensitivity many PCR experts actually recommend.

Reported COVID numbers really can't be compared numerically to anything historical at this point. They are "meaningful" only when compared against each other and even then there are difficulties as countries report things differently. For instance the numbers were inflated in the UK by at least 5000 deaths because the health agency defined COVID as a terminal disease. Once you tested positive, for the rest of your life your death would be marked a COVID death regardless of how much later you died or what of. They "fixed" this by changing forever to 28 days, which is still not a valid way to measure who died of what. That's how you get the New York Times reporting a list of people who died of COVID in which the sixth person on the list was a homicide victim.

Fundamentally, if you look at excess death numbers in a lot of countries, they look like flu season. Reported IFRs have continuously fallen and even the establishment figures are now in range of a strong flu season, not anything more. That's why people keep comparing it to flu.

It's a claim not many are making because it's not clear it's really true.

Firstly, the bulk of the falling IFR is due to more widespread testing driving up numbers of known infections and sero-surveys indicating that even more people than that may have been infected. It's not primarily driven by better survival rates, although they did get better.

At this point it seems clear that mass ventilation was a mistake. It was actually killing people rather than saving them because it's a last-ditch resort. COVID wasn't actually deadly enough to justify this and the large scale usage was driven more by the lack of reliable information, the somewhat unusual form of presenting pneumonia in early patients, the belief that it was an extremely deadly virus and the fact that ventilators force all air coming out of the patients lungs through high quality filters, so doctors are trained that ventilation stops infected patients pumping virus into hospitals.

But doctors are smart and pretty quickly figured out that the ventilation was making things worse, that they couldn't keep the hospitals virus-free anyway, and at any rate they were about to run out of the machines so their hands were forced and they had to try something new. After that usage of ventilation went back to more normal policies, with supplemental oxygen being deemed sufficient for even quite extreme cases, because of course almost all cases need little or no hospital treatment.

Meanwhile many drugs were tried and some were hailed as drugs that could help, e.g. remdesivir or hydroxychloroquine. But later on more controlled studies done under calmer conditions concluded they actually seemed to have no effect.

Given this progress of events it's hard to argue that treatment methods actually got better, except in a very technical sense that most people wouldn't really mean. They got better in the sense that they returned to normal for this kind of virus and stopped making the situation worse. If there had been no mass panic at the start it's likely treatments would never have got so extreme to start with.

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

The UK has also quadrupled its testing rate since April. The numbers aren't directly comparable.

without careful management it risks getting out of control

I don't believe that's been proven at all. The analysis was done many times by now: every government intervention tried so far has no correlation with the course of the disease. That means attempts at management have failed and it has in fact been out of control the whole time, but, fortunately for us, our bodies are generally pretty good at fighting diseases except in the last years of our lives or when immunocompromised in some way, so that hasn't led to disaster.

You're seeing what you want to see. It is normal for elderly patients in nursing homes to die without being in a hospital. You're claiming that Swedish hospitals were so overloaded they turned away patients they would normally have seen, but there is no evidence of that and the paper TIME cited as support actually doesn't give any. Rather, it says:

"Swedish ICU use rates remained lower than predicted, but a large fraction of deaths occurred in non-ICU patients. This suggests that patient prognosis was considered in ICU admission, reducing healthcare load at a cost of decreased survival in patients not admitted."

The latter sentence doesn't follow logically from the first in any way. They are assuming that all COVID patients should have ended up in ICU and if they didn't, that can only be due to evil doctors turning them away at the door despite having spare beds (which Sweden always did have). That is an absurd assumption, unsupported by any direct evidence, which is why they have to rely on invalid statistical inferencing.

What happened is that PCR testing labelled a whole lot of people who were about to die anyway as "COVID deaths". COVID symptoms are so mild in virtually all cases that many patients will have simply got a little bit sick but not enough to rush them to hospital, which can at any rate be quite dangerous for the very elderly and frail, and then they died. Was it COVID that pushed them over the edge? Was it just old age? Who can really say when it gets right to the edge of a life - something has to give.

lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths

By the people who recommended them in the first place. Many other people without obvious conflicts of interest have looked at this and concluded the opposite.

There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation.

The UK Government's own reports say otherwise. In fact here's an article on the BBC today: "Between March and September 2020, there were 24,387 more deaths in England than expected in private homes, and 1,644 in Wales. The large majority did not involve COVID-19."

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54598728

Lockdowns have obviously killed people in the UK. Hospital admissions halved at the start, do you really think that would have had no impact on mortality? There is now a massive cancer backlog. The death toll of COVID is a handful of people per day in the UK, but the death toll from telling people to avoid hospitals during 2020 is going to be racking up for years, perhaps decades.

Why do lockdown supporters so often believe other people are the victims of misinformation? I've read a lot of papers coming out of epidemiology and the academic research establishments this year, many of them are atrocious. They mis-use logic and statistics every third paragraph, scientists mis-represent their own papers in press releases, their code sometimes just doesn't work. The standards in academia are incredibly low and they pump out "misinformation" at a shocking rate. If you simply believe peer reviewed studies without double checking them, you're the one being misled, not me.

Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths.

I live in Switzerland. It had a rather mild lockdown, quite incomparable to many other countries thank god. It's astonishing you believe these were "particularly effective". But if you get your information from TIME, well, it's less of a surprise.