5 ms·

Covid death tolls: scientists acknowledge errors in WHO estimates

28 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

ggm 4y ago
This is how science is meant to work. Ideally? the mistakes wouldn't have happened. They do, so you correct it in public. The problem is politics, and public policy outcomes. The problem is what AGW suffered in the hands of highly charged debates about veracity of data, where people who (this is my opinion and its accusative) were looking with bad faith, for evidence of bad faith, and found it. So, I am sad they had to correct, and glad they did correct, and it doesn't alter science of excess mortality one bit to me, that it happened. As to public policy over WHO and mortality stats, "Its too early to say". (which btw was about paris '68 and not earlier: Zhou Enlai was being asked in 1972 about events in 1968. Not events in 1789 or even 1871) -We won't know how the excess mortality concerns play out in health economics for some time.
- Vecr 4y ago
  What is AGW? Who was looking for what?
  - ggm 4y ago
    Anthropogenic Global Warming. A bunch of critics looked at the weather scientists saying "we moved the probes, the local city was affecting temperature" and said "ITS A CHEAT GLOBAL WARMING IS A SHAM" There was no good will in the room. They took "we moved them" to "you lied" to "its all a lie" to "evidence is big here, you will be first up against the wall" They weaponised science adjusting in the light of emerging information.
- parkingrift 4y ago
  No, this is not how science is meant to work. This report should have been thoroughly peer reviewed before it was released, not after. Countries use these type of reports to manage public policy. It is incomprehensible that the WHO would release a report with such glaring mistakes. This is especially true in light of all their other failures during Covid. I’m glad they’re correcting the mistakes but based on this article they seem in no rush to actually fix the report. “We’ll get to it later this year.” I’m sorry, what?!? The report should be pulled until they have confidence in the numbers. And they should get that confidence through peer review.
- ls15 4y ago
  > Ideally? the mistakes wouldn't have happened. I am not fine with calling it a mistake when almost everyone who pointed issues out upfront was marginalized, factchecked™, downvoted and/or vilified.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > everyone who pointed issues out upfront was marginalized, factchecked™, downvoted and/or vilified This feels overdramatic. Especially if you're just complaining about social media, where everyone is arguing about everything all the time. They acknowledged the mistake, therefore everyone who pointed out issues wasn't dismissed.
    - throwntoday 4y ago
      >They acknowledged the mistake, therefore everyone who pointed out issues wasn't dismissed. This is hardly an honest take. They are acknowledging it >2 years after the fact. It is outright dishonest to say that people who questioned "the science" were not ostracized.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > They are acknowledging it >2 years after the fact. The study was released only a month ago! May 5, 2022 https://www.who.int/news/item/05-05-2022-14.9-million-excess-deaths-were-associated-with-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-2020-and-2021 https://www.who.int/news/item/05-05-2022-14.9-million-excess... The story here is that corrections were made to the numbers for 2 countries in a recent study covering the whole world. The story is not "WHO repudiates everything it ever said".
        throwntoday 4y ago
        I think you missed my point. Over the last few years one group who have been treating science like a religion to virtue signal online were attacking others for one of the most fundamental concepts of science, questioning everything.
- native_samples 4y ago
  "This is how science is meant to work." It's really not. You seem to be talking about COVID science in general, but this specific WHO debate is something else. Regardless of which way you slice things, it's colossal incompetence and/or mendacity: 1. Either the changes being proposed for Germany and Sweden in the WHO report are correct, in which case the WHO published a report with extremely basic mistakes in it and then realized "immediately" that they had got it all wrong. These wouldn't be "science is hard" type errors, they're "we have no idea what we're doing" type errors, like using the wrong figures or not extrapolating a curve correctly. 2. Or (seems equally plausible), the original report is reasonable and the criticisms are politically motivated. The article admits that they immediately "re-checked" their work because "some critics used the report to criticize Germany's pandemic policy". Then they decided that their scaling factors were not only wrong but shouldn't have been used at all yet they don't explain this. The Nature article doesn't seem to give the people who made the original decisions much of a chance to explain themselves. We're left to assume it was Wakefield who did this but he also doesn't explain the sudden change of heart over scaling nor where those numbers came from or why they were used. Nature just presents what they did as objectively wrong, but it's all just modelling. So Wakefield decides that he doesn't like the fact that lockdown sceptics were using his report and rewrites its conclusions. Why is the WHO report adjusting the death figures reported by national governments to begin with? That would be interesting to know, but he doesn't explain and nor does Nature. He just discards the scaling factors and then asserts his new work is correct now (why should we believe this?). Almost certainly Wakefield and friends don't like the original methodology because it makes Sweden look good and Germany bad. It's predictable "scientists" would attack anything that reports these outcomes because they've been doing that for two years. Sweden proves beyond doubt that lockdowns were a terrible disastrous error by our expert classes, their great death figures make the whole thing immediately obvious. Bad modelling is the primary tool public health people use to control politicians and populations, and they will happily play with models until the data says Sweden was a bloodbath and Germany saved the world. "it doesn't alter science of excess mortality one bit to me, that it happened." It should! You have a group of people who went through multiple rounds of review, then adjusted their methodology immediately after publication for what appears to be political reasons. Clearly this stuff is more like opinions than facts.
osigurdson 4y ago
Given the extreme impact of age on outcomes, it would be more accurate to compute years of life lost vs national average life expectancy instead of a simple count.
- sohkamyung 4y ago
  I think that is mentioned near the end of the article: > Other researchers, including Schöley, have taken a related approach, reporting in preprints how average life expectancy — which is calculated using age-specific mortality rates — has changed over the pandemic in more than 20 countries. On the basis of these calculations, for instance, the United Kingdom has fared worse than Spain and Italy in terms of life expectancy lost over the past two years, even though the three countries have broadly similar excess-death numbers. Spain, Italy and Germany have roughly equal values for life expectancy, and Sweden and other Scandinavian nations had by the end of 2021 recovered the average life-expectancy losses caused by the pandemic (see ‘Life-expectancy losses’).
ls15 4y ago
> In a revision to a technical paper on their methods, researchers cut Germany’s pandemic-related deaths estimate by 37%, pulling its excess death rate below those of the United Kingdom and Spain1. As a German, this was obvious to me when it happened, but the vaccinism was so deep, that anyone who dared to question the status quo was treated like a traitor.
- seattle_spring 4y ago
  What exactly was "obvious"? That there were somewhat less extra deaths than expected (though still a lot)? How was it obvious?
  - ls15 4y ago
    It was not socially accepted to ask if someone died with Covid or from Covid. To me it is obvious that this alone already leads to wildly inaccurate data. There have been incentive structures for hospitals to make their Covid numbers larger than they actually were. There clearly was a bias towards seeing Covid as severe as it can possibly be seen. Not a big surprise for me to see afterwards that the numbers were indeed exaggerated. Tim Röhn's investigations provide some deeper insight (German): https://nitter.net/Tim_Roehn https://nitter.net/Tim_Roehn For example Hamburg put all patients were vaccination status was unknown into the unvaccinated group. This clearly makes no sense and was corrected late, but things like these made the official numbers. They claimed 90% of infections were affecting unvaccinated people. As a consequence politicians started to call it a "Pandemic of the unvaccinated". The real numbers were these: - 63,2 % Impfstatus unbekannt (unknown) - 22,5 % Geimpfte (vaccinated) - 14,3 % Ungeimpfte (unvaccinated) https://nitter.net/Tim_Roehn/status/1471802903191076870#m https://nitter.net/Tim_Roehn/status/1471802903191076870#m The deeper you look, the more you find out, how many numbers were estimated, model-based, outdated, skewed by weird incentives or otherwise incorrect instead of just plain simple counts, based on common criteria, like they appear to be at first glance.
    - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
      Important to know. I think it's obvious what the reason was - stoking fear in the populace.
aaron695 4y ago
nsonha 4y ago
> To work out how many people died because of the pandemic, researchers model all deaths over the period and subtract a baseline of expected deaths (those that would have occurred in the absence of a pandemic). What remains is deaths above the norm: a more reliable measure of pandemic-related mortality "deaths above the norm" is proxy for COVID deaths, because COVID is the only thing not normal about this time? /s

28 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

ggm 4y ago

This is how science is meant to work. Ideally? the mistakes wouldn't have happened. They do, so you correct it in public. The problem is politics, and public policy outcomes. The problem is what AGW suffered in the hands of highly charged debates about veracity of data, where people who (this is my opinion and its accusative) were looking with bad faith, for evidence of bad faith, and found it. So, I am sad they had to correct, and glad they did correct, and it doesn't alter science of excess mortality one bit to me, that it happened. As to public policy over WHO and mortality stats, "Its too early to say". (which btw was about paris '68 and not earlier: Zhou Enlai was being asked in 1972 about events in 1968. Not events in 1789 or even 1871) -We won't know how the excess mortality concerns play out in health economics for some time.

Vecr 4y ago
What is AGW? Who was looking for what?
- ggm 4y ago
  Anthropogenic Global Warming. A bunch of critics looked at the weather scientists saying "we moved the probes, the local city was affecting temperature" and said "ITS A CHEAT GLOBAL WARMING IS A SHAM" There was no good will in the room. They took "we moved them" to "you lied" to "its all a lie" to "evidence is big here, you will be first up against the wall" They weaponised science adjusting in the light of emerging information.
parkingrift 4y ago
No, this is not how science is meant to work. This report should have been thoroughly peer reviewed before it was released, not after. Countries use these type of reports to manage public policy. It is incomprehensible that the WHO would release a report with such glaring mistakes. This is especially true in light of all their other failures during Covid. I’m glad they’re correcting the mistakes but based on this article they seem in no rush to actually fix the report. “We’ll get to it later this year.” I’m sorry, what?!? The report should be pulled until they have confidence in the numbers. And they should get that confidence through peer review.
ls15 4y ago
> Ideally? the mistakes wouldn't have happened. I am not fine with calling it a mistake when almost everyone who pointed issues out upfront was marginalized, factchecked™, downvoted and/or vilified.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > everyone who pointed issues out upfront was marginalized, factchecked™, downvoted and/or vilified This feels overdramatic. Especially if you're just complaining about social media, where everyone is arguing about everything all the time. They acknowledged the mistake, therefore everyone who pointed out issues wasn't dismissed.
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    >They acknowledged the mistake, therefore everyone who pointed out issues wasn't dismissed. This is hardly an honest take. They are acknowledging it >2 years after the fact. It is outright dishonest to say that people who questioned "the science" were not ostracized.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > They are acknowledging it >2 years after the fact. The study was released only a month ago! May 5, 2022 https://www.who.int/news/item/05-05-2022-14.9-million-excess-deaths-were-associated-with-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-2020-and-2021 https://www.who.int/news/item/05-05-2022-14.9-million-excess... The story here is that corrections were made to the numbers for 2 countries in a recent study covering the whole world. The story is not "WHO repudiates everything it ever said".
      - throwntoday 4y ago
        I think you missed my point. Over the last few years one group who have been treating science like a religion to virtue signal online were attacking others for one of the most fundamental concepts of science, questioning everything.
native_samples 4y ago
"This is how science is meant to work." It's really not. You seem to be talking about COVID science in general, but this specific WHO debate is something else. Regardless of which way you slice things, it's colossal incompetence and/or mendacity: 1. Either the changes being proposed for Germany and Sweden in the WHO report are correct, in which case the WHO published a report with extremely basic mistakes in it and then realized "immediately" that they had got it all wrong. These wouldn't be "science is hard" type errors, they're "we have no idea what we're doing" type errors, like using the wrong figures or not extrapolating a curve correctly. 2. Or (seems equally plausible), the original report is reasonable and the criticisms are politically motivated. The article admits that they immediately "re-checked" their work because "some critics used the report to criticize Germany's pandemic policy". Then they decided that their scaling factors were not only wrong but shouldn't have been used at all yet they don't explain this. The Nature article doesn't seem to give the people who made the original decisions much of a chance to explain themselves. We're left to assume it was Wakefield who did this but he also doesn't explain the sudden change of heart over scaling nor where those numbers came from or why they were used. Nature just presents what they did as objectively wrong, but it's all just modelling. So Wakefield decides that he doesn't like the fact that lockdown sceptics were using his report and rewrites its conclusions. Why is the WHO report adjusting the death figures reported by national governments to begin with? That would be interesting to know, but he doesn't explain and nor does Nature. He just discards the scaling factors and then asserts his new work is correct now (why should we believe this?). Almost certainly Wakefield and friends don't like the original methodology because it makes Sweden look good and Germany bad. It's predictable "scientists" would attack anything that reports these outcomes because they've been doing that for two years. Sweden proves beyond doubt that lockdowns were a terrible disastrous error by our expert classes, their great death figures make the whole thing immediately obvious. Bad modelling is the primary tool public health people use to control politicians and populations, and they will happily play with models until the data says Sweden was a bloodbath and Germany saved the world. "it doesn't alter science of excess mortality one bit to me, that it happened." It should! You have a group of people who went through multiple rounds of review, then adjusted their methodology immediately after publication for what appears to be political reasons. Clearly this stuff is more like opinions than facts.

osigurdson 4y ago

Given the extreme impact of age on outcomes, it would be more accurate to compute years of life lost vs national average life expectancy instead of a simple count.

sohkamyung 4y ago
I think that is mentioned near the end of the article: > Other researchers, including Schöley, have taken a related approach, reporting in preprints how average life expectancy — which is calculated using age-specific mortality rates — has changed over the pandemic in more than 20 countries. On the basis of these calculations, for instance, the United Kingdom has fared worse than Spain and Italy in terms of life expectancy lost over the past two years, even though the three countries have broadly similar excess-death numbers. Spain, Italy and Germany have roughly equal values for life expectancy, and Sweden and other Scandinavian nations had by the end of 2021 recovered the average life-expectancy losses caused by the pandemic (see ‘Life-expectancy losses’).

ls15 4y ago

> In a revision to a technical paper on their methods, researchers cut Germany’s pandemic-related deaths estimate by 37%, pulling its excess death rate below those of the United Kingdom and Spain1. As a German, this was obvious to me when it happened, but the vaccinism was so deep, that anyone who dared to question the status quo was treated like a traitor.

seattle_spring 4y ago
What exactly was "obvious"? That there were somewhat less extra deaths than expected (though still a lot)? How was it obvious?
- ls15 4y ago
  It was not socially accepted to ask if someone died with Covid or from Covid. To me it is obvious that this alone already leads to wildly inaccurate data. There have been incentive structures for hospitals to make their Covid numbers larger than they actually were. There clearly was a bias towards seeing Covid as severe as it can possibly be seen. Not a big surprise for me to see afterwards that the numbers were indeed exaggerated. Tim Röhn's investigations provide some deeper insight (German): https://nitter.net/Tim_Roehn https://nitter.net/Tim_Roehn For example Hamburg put all patients were vaccination status was unknown into the unvaccinated group. This clearly makes no sense and was corrected late, but things like these made the official numbers. They claimed 90% of infections were affecting unvaccinated people. As a consequence politicians started to call it a "Pandemic of the unvaccinated". The real numbers were these: - 63,2 % Impfstatus unbekannt (unknown) - 22,5 % Geimpfte (vaccinated) - 14,3 % Ungeimpfte (unvaccinated) https://nitter.net/Tim_Roehn/status/1471802903191076870#m https://nitter.net/Tim_Roehn/status/1471802903191076870#m The deeper you look, the more you find out, how many numbers were estimated, model-based, outdated, skewed by weird incentives or otherwise incorrect instead of just plain simple counts, based on common criteria, like they appear to be at first glance.
  - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    Important to know. I think it's obvious what the reason was - stoking fear in the populace.

aaron695 4y ago

nsonha 4y ago

> To work out how many people died because of the pandemic, researchers model all deaths over the period and subtract a baseline of expected deaths (those that would have occurred in the absence of a pandemic). What remains is deaths above the norm: a more reliable measure of pandemic-related mortality "deaths above the norm" is proxy for COVID deaths, because COVID is the only thing not normal about this time? /s