4 ms·

Even before the masks, they were presenting "case fatility rates" as "infection fatility rates" (by just calling them "death rate", which everyone understands a

by cm2187 5y ago

Even before the masks, they were presenting "case fatility rates" as "infection fatility rates" (by just calling them "death rate", which everyone understands as risk of death when infected), when there was hardly any test. Of course if you only test people who show up at the ICU, you will get a very high death rate. That was obvious from the outset and I think deliberate disinformation as a scare tactic. It is not before June that they started admitting that the IFR was way below 1%, when the first serology studies started showing up (though I came to believe that this number is meaningless, you need to look at IFR by age). Sam Harris invited Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease MD from John Hopkins in early April 2020, and his estimate at that time was around 0.5%. So it's not like the information wasn't there.

phh 5y ago
Well yes the information was there, I remember clearly that back then, we had the "perfect" measurement (for such an early study that is): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P... 14 people out of 2666 died, hence 0.5% death rate (because I don't agree with the estimate that only 700 individuals got it, I saw no good reason not to consider everyone got it, but even without that, it'd give low 2%) A retrospective on who said what on the matter of death rates would be extremely interesting to pick the ""good"" medias and the ""bad"" ones
zarzavat 5y ago
A great number of politicians still don't understand the difference between cases and infections. So you see for instance travel from rich countries in Europe being banned, and rich European countries banning each other, purely because they do enough testing to quantify the number of infections. And when Omicron arrived it was the countries with the highest sequencing capacities that were in the firing line.
neuronic 5y ago
I think this is more nuanced. In the beginning, testing was very sparse and unavailable so it's hard to blame anyone for just looking at the obvious infections. It took a while until we even understood that the majority of cases are asymptomatic and very mild. The 1% IFR is trueish across all age groups but not so much when you look at specific age groups. You can clearly see it in current German data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covid-19-deaths-by-gender-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi... You might have an asysmptomatic child with a 0.003% IFR and hand them to your grandparents for caretaking, with a quite high chance of putting them into the ICU if infected. So it's not so easy to deal with like a cold. Also, variants might change the distribution and death isn't the only negative outcome of a COVID infection. It's a systemic disease affecting all organs which will put a strain on the health systems for a long time to come, especially if it becomes endemic and people will just keep reinfecting themselves year after year. It's too shortsighted to just dismiss it as a cold just because cases are often very mild.

by cm2187 5y ago

phh 5y ago

Well yes the information was there, I remember clearly that back then, we had the "perfect" measurement (for such an early study that is): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P... 14 people out of 2666 died, hence 0.5% death rate (because I don't agree with the estimate that only 700 individuals got it, I saw no good reason not to consider everyone got it, but even without that, it'd give low 2%) A retrospective on who said what on the matter of death rates would be extremely interesting to pick the ""good"" medias and the ""bad"" ones

zarzavat 5y ago

A great number of politicians still don't understand the difference between cases and infections. So you see for instance travel from rich countries in Europe being banned, and rich European countries banning each other, purely because they do enough testing to quantify the number of infections. And when Omicron arrived it was the countries with the highest sequencing capacities that were in the firing line.

neuronic 5y ago

I think this is more nuanced. In the beginning, testing was very sparse and unavailable so it's hard to blame anyone for just looking at the obvious infections. It took a while until we even understood that the majority of cases are asymptomatic and very mild. The 1% IFR is trueish across all age groups but not so much when you look at specific age groups. You can clearly see it in current German data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covid-19-deaths-by-gender-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105512/coronavirus-covi... You might have an asysmptomatic child with a 0.003% IFR and hand them to your grandparents for caretaking, with a quite high chance of putting them into the ICU if infected. So it's not so easy to deal with like a cold. Also, variants might change the distribution and death isn't the only negative outcome of a COVID infection. It's a systemic disease affecting all organs which will put a strain on the health systems for a long time to come, especially if it becomes endemic and people will just keep reinfecting themselves year after year. It's too shortsighted to just dismiss it as a cold just because cases are often very mild.