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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely mean this with no disrespect but how knowledgeable are you about this & if you aren't why do you think some data collecting from the internet & "back of the envelope" spreadsheet-ing makes you able to reasonably question world experts that dedicated their careers to virology and pandemics?

If you are a programmer how much would you appreciate a medical doctor with no training or experience in software development questioning your technical decisions about what to use when building a software service?

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Probably because it's hard to trust public health experts in a crisis whose very existence has already demonstrated a failure in their authority.

If I wanted to reduce the risk of acquiring or transmitting an airborne infection back in February, I would wear a mask and avoid enclosed spaces without waiting for CDC's permission. Indeed, I would ignore their advice to the contrary, which stood until April (!)

It would be really nice if we could defer to competent technocratic experts, but they earn their trust by having credible track records, not by collecting credentials.

As far as I can see the main screw up was the American and British governments ignoring expert advice. I live in Germany which happens to have a responsible adult in charge & this country fared great in this crisis so far.

No thanks. The Hippocratic oath is meaningless unless the subject decides what constutites a medical procedure.

The train to technocratic ditatorship is paved with... the great glucose poisioning epidemic, loss of free speech, loss of self defense. Todays conventional wisdom is often not looked on favorably in the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRnB9El_V5g

Are we going to wear masks for the rest of our lives (outside FFS)? Pandemics are an authortarian dream. The ability to engineer pandemics will only expand.

A bit of scale: Consider how many children go missing in the US each year.

The 0.4% fatality estimate is from the CDC, presumably full of credentialed experts. My spreadsheet is a collection of studies from experts who have presumably dedicated their careers to virology and pandemics. The 0.2% number is also from the CDC. I’m not out there doing science, I’m just looking at the data.

I’m not sure what the basis is if your criticism. If a medical doctor wants to submit a PR I would review it based on merits.

It looks like your spreadsheet divides deaths on a given date by (confirmed and estimated) cases on that same date? This will bias your estimate downward. There is a significant lag between diagnosis and death (and even more so between infection and death -- which of these is relevant depends on how you are estimating unreported cases), but you're implicitly assuming that 100% of unresolved cases will end in recovery.

You are correct, deaths lag a bit, as does reporting of the deaths, which downward biases the IFR. Antibodies also lag before they show up in the serology tests, which upward biases the IFR.

But broadly, the studies I've cited largely back up the CDC's estimate of 0.4% IFR. Some of them have methodology in the papers themselves which give similar numbers, and I encourage you to read the raw data.

But an IFR close to the flu is not at all surprising. Covid is a respiratory infection. It kills the same way the flu kills (eg. pneumonia), so you'd naively expect them to have similar fatality rates and outcomes, and they do.

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