When it comes to momentous public policy decisions, such as closing down much of the economy, or shutting schools, it is important to use the right metric. Coun

When it comes to momentous public policy decisions, such as closing down much of the economy, or shutting schools, it is important to use the right metric. Counting deaths often works. If deaths are evenly spread across age and health, so that some young children as losing parents, while others are losing grand-parents, a plain count of deaths tells most of the dreadful story. But with COVID deaths are concentrated among the frail elderly. Young children are losing grand-parents, but not the ones that take them to the swing park. It is the frail old ones, or even the great-grandparents. Rather than using a plain count of deaths, we should be looking at Quality Adjusted Life Years lost. There is perhaps a factor of ten at issue here, between a pandemic like the flu that followed the Great War and which killed healthy young people, and our own pandemic. When a healthy young person dies from a cytokine storm perhaps 50 QALYs are lost. When a frail old person dies at 80 instead of 85, perhaps 5 QALYs are lost, or fewer. The article goes with a plain count of deaths. But the article is accusing John Ioannidis of "minimize the dangers of the coronavirus". If the article were accusing Ioannidis of exaggerating the dangers of the corona virus it would hardly matter that the authors own crude approximation over-stated the danger. We would reason transitively. The author over-states the danger, the author says that Ioannidis puts the danger higher than the author does; as readers, we are persuaded that Ioannidis puts the danger higher than he should. But the logic here is the wrong way round. The author is taking a crude, approximate approach, that over-states the danger of the coronavirus by perhaps a factor of ten. Of course he will accuse others of minimizing the dangers. And as readers, we are disappointed that sciencebasedmedicine.org is so careless with the quantitative aspects of mortality.