Yes, I would indeed say that 40M is not his estimate. It was him ridiculing other people's numbers as unrealistic. (Note also the sleight of hand of switching f

Yes, I would indeed say that 40M is not his estimate. It was him ridiculing other people's numbers as unrealistic. (Note also the sleight of hand of switching from US numbers to global ones). While for the 10k number he had used the previous sections to estimate a range, and then chose the middle of that range. Again, it was not phrased in any way as a lower bound, he got to make all the assumptions, and he must have known that this is the number that would get reported in the media. When Ioannidis published that 10k number, the US death toll was at 120 people. Three weeks later, it was at 20k people. Even at that point Ioannidis was still predicting (and this time there can be no ambiguity about it being a prediction): > If I were to make an informed estimate based on the limited testing data we have, I would say that covid-19 will result in fewer than 40,000 deaths this season in the USA. It was an absolutely nonsensical number, there was no possible justification for it. Given the time delays involved, you would have gotten to over 40k deaths even if all further Covid transmission were to stop on dime the moment he made the prediction. This number was exceeded 10 days later. If his "informed estimate" in this situation was 40k, it's quite implausible that the 10k number in much better conditions was just intended as some kind of illustration of what the low end of the range was. Certainly calling him out on the 10k estimate does not make the posted article a hitpiece, like you claimed. > Or do the current numbers fall somewhere within his range? So even if we're charitable and assume he consistently meant IFR when writing CFR, the low end of his range was already known to be impossible at the time of writing. The reality will probably intersect with his range, but that's just because it's so absurdly wide and if we're only concerned with the IFR. But the problem is that what uncertanties remained at the time had an inverse correlation between R0 and IFR. Ioannidis was assuming both to be low. If this article had been all there was to it, one could maybe give Ioannidis the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he really was trying to highlight the amount of uncertainty, and was too naive to realize how the general public would understand the 10k number that he just put in as a meaningless bon mot. But this article wasn't the end of it. He's continued to consistently cherry-pick and misrepresent the data, always in the direction that tries to make Covid appear less serious.