5 ms·

Your sheet is interesting. Looking at it, the IFR varies from 1.66% down to .11% and the 0.11% is for the Santa Clara, which many considered rather suspect. Th

Your sheet is interesting. Looking at it, the IFR varies from 1.66% down to .11% and the 0.11% is for the Santa Clara, which many considered rather suspect. The 1.66%, otoh, seems reasonably in line or at least compatible with what's been observed in Korea and elsewhere. Given age is going to skew things a good deal, it seems like a picture is emerging but not that new a picture. An IFR of even 1% is pretty bad, especially given these statistics show how infectious this virus is.

gst 7y ago
The numbers that are quoted for Austria (which has the listed IFR of 1.66% in the document) weren't obtained via antibody tests, but via PCR tests. Here's a better source than the one linked in the document: https://www.sora.at/uploads/media/Austria_COVID-19_Prevalence_BMBWF_SORA_20200410_EN_Version.pdf https://www.sora.at/uploads/media/Austria_COVID-19_Prevalenc... Most of those tests were done on April 4th and 5th which was 3 weeks after Austria started relatively strict lockdown measures, which also impacts that number, as this will result in the test to find an even lower number of positive people.
newacct583 7y ago
> An IFR of even 1% is pretty bad To be clear: it would be the most dangerous general epidemic disease since the advent of vaccination, and by a significant amount. You need to go back to measles and polio to find general population outbreaks that were more lethal.
- rubber_duck 7y ago
  A very important thing is that % is concentrated among old and people with preexisting health conditions. Not every death is the same - a 80 year old with weak immune system could have lived 5 years longer without corona, but a healthy 20 year-old dying from cytokine storm caused by influenza has lost potentially 60 years of healthy life - the loss is much worse.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    How does that compare, with other high IFR diseases, didn't they also have deaths skewed towards older people?
    - newacct583 7y ago
      To be perfectly fair (and for the record I'm very much not among the "sacrifice the old and weak" set!): not as much as covid. The elderly and immunocompromised obviously die more to almost every illness. But the effect is really pronounced with covid. And most other viral infections tend to kill children at higher rates too, and covid very notably does not. It's definitely an interesting aspect of the disease, though it's produce a kind of horrifying calculus among a lot of the right wing in the US.
    - rootusrootus 7y ago
      The 1918 flu was notable for having a high fatality rate for young children. That does not seem to be the case for flu in general.
  - newacct583 7y ago
    > Not every death is the same OK, so how many "influenza death equivalents" are we looking at? What's your metric for how bad this is? I mean, I think that's a little ghoulish, obviously, but if people really want to make this argument I'd really like to see the kinds of well-founded numbers that the experts are producing. Medical ethics is hardly a new field, after all. You'd think someone would have pulled some analysis off the shelf. Instead, the people pushing "these people would have died anyway" seem to be almost exclusively political actors (or their proxies on social media sites like this one) with a goal of either defending the inaction of the current administration or pushing a policy goal that necessarily sets the virus loose on the public. But if you really want to make a numerate case for not trying to save the old and sick, I'd genuinely and carefully read it.
    - rubber_duck 7y ago
      I think there are already such calculations for approving drugs on public health programs - cost of treatment vs years of quality life provided. So you would need to estimate the number of years lost vs the economic damage. This is impossible to get right on both sides but at least it gives you a framework.
- autokad 7y ago
  or the 1957 Flu pandemic but I suppose that was not long after the polio vaccine.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  > since the advent of vaccination What do you mean? There were vaccines in 1918.

gst 7y ago

The numbers that are quoted for Austria (which has the listed IFR of 1.66% in the document) weren't obtained via antibody tests, but via PCR tests. Here's a better source than the one linked in the document: https://www.sora.at/uploads/media/Austria_COVID-19_Prevalence_BMBWF_SORA_20200410_EN_Version.pdf https://www.sora.at/uploads/media/Austria_COVID-19_Prevalenc... Most of those tests were done on April 4th and 5th which was 3 weeks after Austria started relatively strict lockdown measures, which also impacts that number, as this will result in the test to find an even lower number of positive people.

newacct583 7y ago

> An IFR of even 1% is pretty bad To be clear: it would be the most dangerous general epidemic disease since the advent of vaccination, and by a significant amount. You need to go back to measles and polio to find general population outbreaks that were more lethal.

rubber_duck 7y ago
A very important thing is that % is concentrated among old and people with preexisting health conditions. Not every death is the same - a 80 year old with weak immune system could have lived 5 years longer without corona, but a healthy 20 year-old dying from cytokine storm caused by influenza has lost potentially 60 years of healthy life - the loss is much worse.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  How does that compare, with other high IFR diseases, didn't they also have deaths skewed towards older people?
  - newacct583 7y ago
    To be perfectly fair (and for the record I'm very much not among the "sacrifice the old and weak" set!): not as much as covid. The elderly and immunocompromised obviously die more to almost every illness. But the effect is really pronounced with covid. And most other viral infections tend to kill children at higher rates too, and covid very notably does not. It's definitely an interesting aspect of the disease, though it's produce a kind of horrifying calculus among a lot of the right wing in the US.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    The 1918 flu was notable for having a high fatality rate for young children. That does not seem to be the case for flu in general.
- newacct583 7y ago
  > Not every death is the same OK, so how many "influenza death equivalents" are we looking at? What's your metric for how bad this is? I mean, I think that's a little ghoulish, obviously, but if people really want to make this argument I'd really like to see the kinds of well-founded numbers that the experts are producing. Medical ethics is hardly a new field, after all. You'd think someone would have pulled some analysis off the shelf. Instead, the people pushing "these people would have died anyway" seem to be almost exclusively political actors (or their proxies on social media sites like this one) with a goal of either defending the inaction of the current administration or pushing a policy goal that necessarily sets the virus loose on the public. But if you really want to make a numerate case for not trying to save the old and sick, I'd genuinely and carefully read it.
  - rubber_duck 7y ago
    I think there are already such calculations for approving drugs on public health programs - cost of treatment vs years of quality life provided. So you would need to estimate the number of years lost vs the economic damage. This is impossible to get right on both sides but at least it gives you a framework.
autokad 7y ago
or the 1957 Flu pandemic but I suppose that was not long after the polio vaccine.
AlexCoventry 7y ago
> since the advent of vaccination What do you mean? There were vaccines in 1918.