6 ms·

JetBlue Funded a Stanford Study That Said the Coronavirus Wasn’t That Deadly

78 points by elorant 7y ago

m0llusk 7y ago
This is turning a flawed study into a conspiracy theory and ignoring important related epidemiology. The fact is that the large number of asymptomatic cases led to initial undercounting of infections so the virus appears to be less deadly when looking at numbers that include previously missed cases. This doesn't make the pandemic any less serious. At this point we have data from places with no lockdowns, mild lockdowns, strong lockdowns, and recently ended lockdowns. All of this verifies the long held epidemiology that points out that once a highly infectious agent is loose in the general public lockdowns have extremely limited benefit. This is not a political issue and does not relate to managing airlines or running clickbait web news sites.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  not disclosing a financial conflict of interest is a mayor breach in how to conduct science, and there is exactly zero clickbait let alone conspiracy theories here.
  - m0llusk 6y ago
    The study was thoroughly flawed at the most basic levels of sampling and analysis. The article supposes that the authors of this flawed study did what they did because of who they knew and what the political implications of their published results might be. That is a conspiracy theory and it is presented for emotional impact which makes it clickbait. Meanwhile increased testing is showing increased numbers in the population who are infected with only minor if any symptoms. This has major implications for public health and correct policy, but what is being asserted is that anything that causes a change to the overall mortality rate is likely about politics.
- astronautjones 7y ago
  their study is flawed, the scientists involved went almost exclusively onto right-wing programs to hype their biased results, and they didn't disclose important financial ties - particularly the jetblue guy that wrote an op-ed for the ben shapiro website (damning imo). you can whine about this article being clickbait but it's incredibly well-written and sourced. >The whistleblower complaint made note of the authors’ media appearances, observing that they “coordinated the online publication of a non-peer-reviewed pre-print with multiple press appearances” and “continued to promote the results of this and subsequent studies despite severe criticisms of their pre-print from multiple statisticians.” Indeed, scientists immediately attacked the high-profile study’s recruitment of participants and data analysis, with one calling it a textbook example of “how NOT to do statistics” and another saying he was “alarmed at their sloppy behavior.” One major cause for alarm was that the authors were overly confident in their test’s false-positive rate.
  - DeonPenny 7y ago
    They explained that by saying they went to those sources because left wing news outlets and left win financial source black balled them. But that's not even the issue. How do you explain the fact that their numbers fall right in line with the study from Bonn Germany, or New york, or all the other random sampling studies. Are they all lying?
    - mennis16 7y ago
      New York has far more deaths per capita, it makes no sense for their % positive numbers to fall in line with New York. It is similarly inconsistent with recent numbers out of Spain/Madrid, which was hit quite hard and is still floating around only 10% positive.
    - wahern 7y ago
      There have been, conservatively, at least 20,000 COVID-19 deaths in NYC alone. NYC has a population of 8,300,000. 20,000 / 8,300,000 puts a hard lower bound on IFR of ~0.24%. That is, if we assume that the entire population of NYC has already had SARS-CoV-2, then the lowest mathematically possible IFR for NYC would be ~0.24%. Ioannidis' paper says 2.49%-4.16% of Santa Clara County has already been infected. Santa Clara County has a population of 1.9 million. That means we should expect (1900000 * 0.0249) * 0.0024 == 113 deaths at the lower bound, and (1900000 * 0.0416) * 0.0024 == 189 deaths at the upper bound. Santa Clara County has already recorded 134 deaths, so that number seem to fit. But it fits with the hard, categorical data from NYC only if we assume 100% of NYC to have already been infected. TL;DR: Unless you're prepared to believe that 1) most of NYC residents have already been infected, or 2) that IFR is significantly greater than 0.24% and the actual number of COVID-19 deaths in Santa Clara County is multiples of what's reported then it's clear that Ioannidis' paper is wrong. #2 seems far more plausible and may even be true, but the controversy is the implication of his paper on derived IFR. And if #2 is what's happening, the IFR is definitely greater than what people applying the paper (including, AFAIU, Ioannidis' himself) predict.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "once a highly infectious agent is loose in the general public lockdowns have extremely limited benefit." Huh? What data supports this? It looks like the top dozen or so countries in terms of new cases are almost completely different from a month or two ago. Isn't it obvious this is because the US and western Europe that had the lockdowns slowed it relative to others? Here is a list in descending order of new cases from a day or two ago, see how the US and UK are the only remaining of the first wave. Spain and Italy aren't even there! I don't see how your comment could be more at odds with the information I'm seeing. USA Brazil Russia Peru India UK Chile Pakistan Mexico Iran Saudi Arabia Turkey
  - gowld 7y ago
    That's mostly a list of most populous countries in the world. Is that data per capita?
    - throwlaplace 7y ago
      https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-cases-per-million?tab=map https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-cases-p... there you go (may 9) df=pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/total-daily-covid-cases-per-million.csv") df.sort_values(['Date', 'Daily new confirmed cases per million (cases)'])[-20:][['Entity', 'Daily new confirmed cases per million (cases)']].to_string(index=False) Out[14]: Entity Daily new confirmed cases per million (cases) Saudi Arabia 48.860 Armenia 48.933 Belgium 50.994 Gabon 52.118 Portugal 54.233 United Arab Emirates 55.913 Gibraltar 59.363 Sweden 63.569 United Kingdom 68.482 Chile 72.765 Russia 73.314 United States 81.440 North America 84.775 Sao Tome and Principe 95.820 Belarus 98.737 Peru 100.722 Singapore 131.274 Bahrain 143.984 Kuwait 150.097 Qatar 455.041
tbenst 7y ago
I’m most concerned about the new reporting from Boyd, that according to gold standard ELISA retest of positive samples, just under half came back negative, indicating a possible false positive. Of course, the samples going through freeze thaw cycles may contribute to antibody degradation but seriously concerning.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  You got a link to that? Thanks
- nodamage 6y ago
  This seems like a really big deal, so I'm going to second the request for a source on it.
  - nodamage 6y ago
    Nevermind, it's mentioned in the original article which I missed the first time around: > The following week, Boyd had results in hand. Using ELISA tests to reassess the samples of community members who had come up positive for antibodies on the Premier test, he had ended up getting positive results for a little over half of them.
tasty_freeze 7y ago
There is a way to head off all the quibbling about false positive rates and methodology, etc. Look at the all-cause mortality figures for April vs the historical average for that month. If it isn't COVID-19 killing all of those people at a multiple of the normal death rate, we have an even bigger mystery of what is causing all the extra deaths. In fact, these numbers were apparent for NYC a month ago: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/corona...
- TheCoelacanth 7y ago
  That only works if the quibbling is done in good faith and is based on facts.
- elcritch 7y ago
  It’s not too much of a mystery. There’s a very good likelihood that the fact that people aren’t getting regular healthcare for other health problem has lead to higher deaths rates. Hospital utilization is significantly below normal currently which means those common heart attacks, strokes, cancer screenings, among others are still occurring but not treated and resulting in higher fatalities.
  - cma 6y ago
    But then why would it be correspondingly higher in New York along with their infection rate? Other places were just as locked down without a spike of similar magnitude. That makes no sense.
    - elcritch 6y ago
      Good point, and that could indicate those unaccounted deaths are skewed towards being covid-19 related. There’s still odd patterns with the covid-19 hotspots, and I’d suspect that the underlying reasons could correlate with higher non-covid-19 death rates. As in older and/or sicker populations.
hodgesrm 6y ago
Did I miss something in this article? It says that David Neeleman of Jetblue donated $5,000. I don't know how big Ioannidis' research budget is but this is peanuts. You would think there would be better things for reporters to look into, such as whether Ioannidis might actually have a point.
- cma 6y ago
  "Ioannidis added that he did not know how much the study cost, but the funding came from an anonymized pool of financial gifts given to Stanford’s Office of Development: “This form of funding is the most unconflicted type of funding process to do research. It secures perfect intellectual and scientific independence of the study.” Anonymizes pool of financial gifts but he was in contact with the guy? Is that a joke? And then suggesting funding a lab if the kit is validated: > “David, I think you should write Taia a note and tell her you’ll support her lab if she validates this kit.” Bendavid confirmed that he put Neeleman and Wang in touch.
  - rumanator 6y ago
    > Anonymizes pool of financial gifts but he was in contact with the guy? Is that a joke? More than a joke, it sounds like Ioannidis was out right lying. From the article: > But according to Neeleman, the authors did know he’d given money to fund the study. Neeleman confirmed that he made a $5,000 donation to Stanford to be given to these researchers and that he was in communication with them while they were conducting their research.
fithisux 6y ago
Why would Ioannidis risk reputation for such a small amount? I do not bite it. He did a basic research which is what he is paid to do. If his analysis has flaws a, The paper was peer reviewed b. We can see other peer reviewed papers disprove his findings. The flame wars feed conspiracy theories in both sides. I am not an expert, I am not even a researcher any more, however my possibly flawed opinion is that deadliness of the virus is not a number written in stone and may have seasonal and regional variation.
- cma 6y ago
  That's the only documented amount. We don't know of all the other funders or LLC funders that are associated with him. Even aside from the funding, the article unveils many more disturbing things.
tonywastaken 6y ago
Neeleman is no longer the CEO of JetBlue.

78 points by elorant 7y ago

This is turning a flawed study into a conspiracy theory and ignoring important related epidemiology. The fact is that the large number of asymptomatic cases led to initial undercounting of infections so the virus appears to be less deadly when looking at numbers that include previously missed cases. This doesn't make the pandemic any less serious. At this point we have data from places with no lockdowns, mild lockdowns, strong lockdowns, and recently ended lockdowns. All of this verifies the long held epidemiology that points out that once a highly infectious agent is loose in the general public lockdowns have extremely limited benefit. This is not a political issue and does not relate to managing airlines or running clickbait web news sites.

Barrin92 7y ago
not disclosing a financial conflict of interest is a mayor breach in how to conduct science, and there is exactly zero clickbait let alone conspiracy theories here.
- m0llusk 6y ago
  The study was thoroughly flawed at the most basic levels of sampling and analysis. The article supposes that the authors of this flawed study did what they did because of who they knew and what the political implications of their published results might be. That is a conspiracy theory and it is presented for emotional impact which makes it clickbait. Meanwhile increased testing is showing increased numbers in the population who are infected with only minor if any symptoms. This has major implications for public health and correct policy, but what is being asserted is that anything that causes a change to the overall mortality rate is likely about politics.
astronautjones 7y ago
their study is flawed, the scientists involved went almost exclusively onto right-wing programs to hype their biased results, and they didn't disclose important financial ties - particularly the jetblue guy that wrote an op-ed for the ben shapiro website (damning imo). you can whine about this article being clickbait but it's incredibly well-written and sourced. >The whistleblower complaint made note of the authors’ media appearances, observing that they “coordinated the online publication of a non-peer-reviewed pre-print with multiple press appearances” and “continued to promote the results of this and subsequent studies despite severe criticisms of their pre-print from multiple statisticians.” Indeed, scientists immediately attacked the high-profile study’s recruitment of participants and data analysis, with one calling it a textbook example of “how NOT to do statistics” and another saying he was “alarmed at their sloppy behavior.” One major cause for alarm was that the authors were overly confident in their test’s false-positive rate.
- DeonPenny 7y ago
  They explained that by saying they went to those sources because left wing news outlets and left win financial source black balled them. But that's not even the issue. How do you explain the fact that their numbers fall right in line with the study from Bonn Germany, or New york, or all the other random sampling studies. Are they all lying?
  - mennis16 7y ago
    New York has far more deaths per capita, it makes no sense for their % positive numbers to fall in line with New York. It is similarly inconsistent with recent numbers out of Spain/Madrid, which was hit quite hard and is still floating around only 10% positive.
  - wahern 7y ago
    There have been, conservatively, at least 20,000 COVID-19 deaths in NYC alone. NYC has a population of 8,300,000. 20,000 / 8,300,000 puts a hard lower bound on IFR of ~0.24%. That is, if we assume that the entire population of NYC has already had SARS-CoV-2, then the lowest mathematically possible IFR for NYC would be ~0.24%. Ioannidis' paper says 2.49%-4.16% of Santa Clara County has already been infected. Santa Clara County has a population of 1.9 million. That means we should expect (1900000 * 0.0249) * 0.0024 == 113 deaths at the lower bound, and (1900000 * 0.0416) * 0.0024 == 189 deaths at the upper bound. Santa Clara County has already recorded 134 deaths, so that number seem to fit. But it fits with the hard, categorical data from NYC only if we assume 100% of NYC to have already been infected. TL;DR: Unless you're prepared to believe that 1) most of NYC residents have already been infected, or 2) that IFR is significantly greater than 0.24% and the actual number of COVID-19 deaths in Santa Clara County is multiples of what's reported then it's clear that Ioannidis' paper is wrong. #2 seems far more plausible and may even be true, but the controversy is the implication of his paper on derived IFR. And if #2 is what's happening, the IFR is definitely greater than what people applying the paper (including, AFAIU, Ioannidis' himself) predict.
perl4ever 7y ago
"once a highly infectious agent is loose in the general public lockdowns have extremely limited benefit." Huh? What data supports this? It looks like the top dozen or so countries in terms of new cases are almost completely different from a month or two ago. Isn't it obvious this is because the US and western Europe that had the lockdowns slowed it relative to others? Here is a list in descending order of new cases from a day or two ago, see how the US and UK are the only remaining of the first wave. Spain and Italy aren't even there! I don't see how your comment could be more at odds with the information I'm seeing. USA Brazil Russia Peru India UK Chile Pakistan Mexico Iran Saudi Arabia Turkey
- gowld 7y ago
  That's mostly a list of most populous countries in the world. Is that data per capita?
  - throwlaplace 7y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-cases-per-million?tab=map https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-cases-p... there you go (may 9) df=pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/total-daily-covid-cases-per-million.csv") df.sort_values(['Date', 'Daily new confirmed cases per million (cases)'])[-20:][['Entity', 'Daily new confirmed cases per million (cases)']].to_string(index=False) Out[14]: Entity Daily new confirmed cases per million (cases) Saudi Arabia 48.860 Armenia 48.933 Belgium 50.994 Gabon 52.118 Portugal 54.233 United Arab Emirates 55.913 Gibraltar 59.363 Sweden 63.569 United Kingdom 68.482 Chile 72.765 Russia 73.314 United States 81.440 North America 84.775 Sao Tome and Principe 95.820 Belarus 98.737 Peru 100.722 Singapore 131.274 Bahrain 143.984 Kuwait 150.097 Qatar 455.041

tbenst 7y ago

I’m most concerned about the new reporting from Boyd, that according to gold standard ELISA retest of positive samples, just under half came back negative, indicating a possible false positive. Of course, the samples going through freeze thaw cycles may contribute to antibody degradation but seriously concerning.

Gibbon1 6y ago
You got a link to that? Thanks
nodamage 6y ago
This seems like a really big deal, so I'm going to second the request for a source on it.
- nodamage 6y ago
  Nevermind, it's mentioned in the original article which I missed the first time around: > The following week, Boyd had results in hand. Using ELISA tests to reassess the samples of community members who had come up positive for antibodies on the Premier test, he had ended up getting positive results for a little over half of them.

tasty_freeze 7y ago

There is a way to head off all the quibbling about false positive rates and methodology, etc. Look at the all-cause mortality figures for April vs the historical average for that month. If it isn't COVID-19 killing all of those people at a multiple of the normal death rate, we have an even bigger mystery of what is causing all the extra deaths. In fact, these numbers were apparent for NYC a month ago: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/corona...

TheCoelacanth 7y ago
That only works if the quibbling is done in good faith and is based on facts.
elcritch 7y ago
It’s not too much of a mystery. There’s a very good likelihood that the fact that people aren’t getting regular healthcare for other health problem has lead to higher deaths rates. Hospital utilization is significantly below normal currently which means those common heart attacks, strokes, cancer screenings, among others are still occurring but not treated and resulting in higher fatalities.
- cma 6y ago
  But then why would it be correspondingly higher in New York along with their infection rate? Other places were just as locked down without a spike of similar magnitude. That makes no sense.
  - elcritch 6y ago
    Good point, and that could indicate those unaccounted deaths are skewed towards being covid-19 related. There’s still odd patterns with the covid-19 hotspots, and I’d suspect that the underlying reasons could correlate with higher non-covid-19 death rates. As in older and/or sicker populations.

hodgesrm 6y ago

Did I miss something in this article? It says that David Neeleman of Jetblue donated $5,000. I don't know how big Ioannidis' research budget is but this is peanuts. You would think there would be better things for reporters to look into, such as whether Ioannidis might actually have a point.

cma 6y ago
"Ioannidis added that he did not know how much the study cost, but the funding came from an anonymized pool of financial gifts given to Stanford’s Office of Development: “This form of funding is the most unconflicted type of funding process to do research. It secures perfect intellectual and scientific independence of the study.” Anonymizes pool of financial gifts but he was in contact with the guy? Is that a joke? And then suggesting funding a lab if the kit is validated: > “David, I think you should write Taia a note and tell her you’ll support her lab if she validates this kit.” Bendavid confirmed that he put Neeleman and Wang in touch.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > Anonymizes pool of financial gifts but he was in contact with the guy? Is that a joke? More than a joke, it sounds like Ioannidis was out right lying. From the article: > But according to Neeleman, the authors did know he’d given money to fund the study. Neeleman confirmed that he made a $5,000 donation to Stanford to be given to these researchers and that he was in communication with them while they were conducting their research.

fithisux 6y ago

Why would Ioannidis risk reputation for such a small amount? I do not bite it. He did a basic research which is what he is paid to do. If his analysis has flaws a, The paper was peer reviewed b. We can see other peer reviewed papers disprove his findings. The flame wars feed conspiracy theories in both sides. I am not an expert, I am not even a researcher any more, however my possibly flawed opinion is that deadliness of the virus is not a number written in stone and may have seasonal and regional variation.

cma 6y ago
That's the only documented amount. We don't know of all the other funders or LLC funders that are associated with him. Even aside from the funding, the article unveils many more disturbing things.

tonywastaken 6y ago

Neeleman is no longer the CEO of JetBlue.