Look, I appreciate the discussion, and I’m about to sign off. I just want to say, it’s easy to take the wrong numbers, multiply together, and see 100 ways that

Look, I appreciate the discussion, and I’m about to sign off. I just want to say, it’s easy to take the wrong numbers, multiply together, and see 100 ways that millions of people die. That’s fear mongering. What I believe is that it’s incumbent on anyone who wants to participant in predictive discussions to do so responsibly and using only the best numbers that we have on hand. Anything could happen. And this is always true, whether it’s the Ebola discussion from a while back, or SARS, or MERS, or COVID today. You still seem to insist on claiming that we could see pervasive worldwide infection, 5% ICU admits, and 1.4%+ general population fatality. I hope you will soon realize that is not actually representative of what we are facing, where in fact, the vast majority of cases are mild or even asymptomatic. I expect this will be clear even to the most avid doomers by mid-April. Lastly, I don’t want to go back and forth on little things, but this; > at the same time make up stuff you rail against that never happened in the first place. Fix your own issues first. I think you need to re-read what I originally wrote. I never strawmaned. I said the numbers were all wrong as they were stated due to lack of proper context. I could have used the word “useless” or “misleading” instead of “wrong” and that might have been better. I then followed up by saying it’s imperative not to try to use those numbers to extrapolate in the general population. I could have said “one must not”. I was not accusing Op of doing this. I was trying to say that the danger of not properly qualifying the context of a percentage like case fatality is that people will misuse it by improperly extrapolating. Then we found an example down thread which does exactly that... and you defend it anyway. Which is fine, but I stand my ground on the argument (same as the NEJM doctors) that it’s improper to extrapolate the hospital case fatality to the general population. If one “assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%.” (NEJM)