obvert
Posts: 14050
Joined: 1/17/2011 From: PDX (and now) London, UK Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn Stanford Professor: Data Indicates We’re Severely Overreacting To Coronavirus March 30th, 2020 https://www.stress.org/stanford-professor-data-indicates-were-severely-overreacting-to-coronavirus "In an analysis published Tuesday, Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis — co-director of the university’s Meta-Research Innovation Center and professor of medicine, biomedical data science, statistics, and epidemiology and population health — suggests that the response to the coronavirus pandemic may be “a fiasco in the making” because we are making seismic decisions based on “utterly unreliable” data. The data we do have, Ioannidis explains, indicates that we are likely severely overreacting. “The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco,” Ioannidis writes in an opinion piece published by STAT on Tuesday." quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel This conclusion by the Stanford professor in the link just provided by MakeLearn is significant: This is from Mid-March. The Stress.org somehow ran it about two weeks after it appeared in Stat, and only about half of his article, leading to misleading assumptions about what he was actually concluding. He does make some very good points about the Diamond Princess that I am very interested in. He was a bit off in his optimism, unfortunately. A lot of good ideas in here, but like many he didn't see this getting as severe as it is currently. US deaths are already above his estimate below at 12,197 according to the wikipedia chart just now. The full article is here in Stat. https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.
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< Message edited by obvert -- 4/7/2020 5:46:02 PM >
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