Comment: He's hedging by saying 'it might not be as deadly as the flu'. We're confident we can dispense with the academic stance on his behalf and say what he's really thinking: IT'S NOT AS DEADLY AS THE FLU.


covid test
A Stanford statistician says COVID-19 isn't as deadly as we thought — but his calculations in a new study are already under attack from critics who say it overlooks the actual body count.


Comment: They haven't even reported his finding yet but they're already bringing in 'official critics'!


In an analysis, Dr. John Ioannidis places the fatality rate between 0.02%-0.4%, far lower than the 1%-and-way-up numbers that were once bandied about - and much closer to the 0.1% death rate of the flu.

"While COVID-19 is a formidable threat, the fact that its IFR (infection fatality rate) is much lower than originally feared, is a welcome piece of evidence," he wrote. "At a very broad, bird's eye view level, worldwide the IFR of COVID-19 this season may be in the same ballpark as the IFR of influenza."

The calculations don't mean that the virus isn't all that dangerous - because the number of lives lost due to COVID-19, even under tough shelter restrictions, dwarfs the number of deaths due to the flu.


Comment: No, they don't. The true numbers are way lower than they're reporting because they're telling doctors to presume EVERYONE they see has it...


"COVID death totals will be much much greater than the flu," said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at UC Irvine and an expert in flu pandemics. In three months, more than 93,500 Americans have died of COVID-19 and the number keeps climbing. During the typical six-month flu season, between 24,000 to 62,000 people die.


Comment: PRESUMED to have 'died of Covid-19'...


Because there is an annual vaccine, "not everyone is susceptible to the flu. Everyone is susceptible to COVID-19," Noymer said. "These flu comparisons are missing the forest for the trees."


Comment: Says someone who couldn't see a forest right now if his life depended on it.


Determining death rates is challenging in the middle of a pandemic. Until recently, we've based our estimates on confirmed cases, which are easy to count, rather than infections, which are not. That's overestimated the true lethality of the virus.

The recent emergence of antibody testing — blood tests that show whether someone has been infected in the past, even without symptoms — makes it possible, finally, to ask: What is the real risk?

It's a key question facing communities, which are braced for resurgent waves of infection that could last until there's a vaccine.

Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and epidemiology, has long argued that the lockdowns pose a bigger threat to public health than the COVID-19 virus. One of the authors of a pilloried Santa Clara County study, he has repeatedly questioned the prevailing wisdom of our current shelter-at-home strategy.

In his new analysis — a "pre-print" that is posted online, but not published in a scientific journal and not yet peer-reviewed - he selected 12 studies that measured seroprevalence, which show how many people in population samples have developed antibodies for the COVID-19 virus.

He estimated the Infection Fatality Rate by dividing the number of deaths among the people in those studies by the estimated number of people with antibodies.

The highest rates, from 0.25 to 0.4%, were in locations where infections occurred among elderly citizens or healthcare workers. The lowest rates were found in studies of blood donors, who tend to be younger and healthy.

Critics charge that he based his calculations on flawed studies. And they question the selection of studies — including deaths in healthy blood donors, for instance, but not including a recent Spanish seroprevalence study with an estimated IFR of 1% to 1.3% — triple the highest estimate in his review.


Comment: ...but still one tenth of what they were telling us it was pre-lockdowns...


"A lot of the included studies had issues, and contradicted evidence from numerous places in the world, making the review itself a bit problematic," said Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an Australian epidemiologist who studies chronic disease.

UC Irvine's Noymer agrees that the death rate is lower than initially estimated. That is to be expected, he said; faced with a growing case count and an unknown virus, we prepared for the worst.


Comment: Right. But WHEN HAS THAT EVER HAPPENED BEFORE??


What matters is that COVID-19 will kill more people in the United States this year than even our most severe flu season, he said.

"We shouldn't fetishize a number when we can look out the window at an epidemic and see the real situation," he said. "We have seen more COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. in three months - with a lockdown - than in the six-month flu season, without a lockdown."