But he could have said we were lucky to not have gotten hit by a different virus that kills 80% and travels asymptomatically. The real nightmare virus. It’s totally possible.
We have had roughly 860k COVID deaths in the US. At a 0.02% fatality rate that would equate to 4.3b cases. So are you suggesting the US death total is exaggerated or that the average American has already had COVID 10+ times?
He said when you sample randomly and follow positive testers to their conclusion, the lethality rate is something like 0.02%. I’m sorry that it upsets you to hear something you don’t already agree with
Honestly does not sound too reputable to me on this specific subject matter.
Edit: I realize now that you are saying to listen to the podcast guest, not Lex Fridman himself. Is this the episode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA
"The Great Barrington Declaration […] advocated letting the virus spread in lower-risk groups with the aim of herd immunity, with "focused protection" of those most at risk." [0]
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-94-percent-covi...
You should go back to the person who told you this lie and ask them why they did it. A simple accounting of excess deaths ( https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm ) is all you need to dispel the notion of a 0.02% fatality rate.
That’s from sep 2020. I think professor Bhattacharya is aware of the numbers.
Professor Bhattacharya is apparently one of the main instigators of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration .
So I think he is fudging the numbers.
By a factor of ten?!?
As an example, a Stanford professor by the name of Dr. Scott Atlas was a prominent voice within the Trump administration who actively advocated disobedience of public-health orders at the state level. When the professor posted this (since-deleted) tweet:
https://i.imgur.com/z0OsMcg.png
.... I wrote his department head. "I thought you should know that some idiot is out there claiming to be associated with your university." They replied, "Agreed, this is irresponsible at best."
Funny thing, though. Dr. Atlas is still a Stanford-affiliated professor, more than a year later: https://profiles.stanford.edu/scott-atlas Tenure is a powerful thing, I guess. Stanford apparently can't distance themselves from this clown, but you and I can and should. That's not who you listened to, by any chance, is it?
What's not debatable is that the fatality rate is not 0.02%, or anything close to it. The numbers don't work. If that's what he's saying, then he's telling you that your state and local health authorities have been lying to you all along... and while not an unprecedented thing (unfortunately), that's still a deadly serious accusation. You should demand that he back it up with solid citations. He won't, so you'll need to look at other sources of data and evaluate them to the best of your ability if you want to get a more accurate picture.
In the meantime, it's important not to spread false info during a pandemic, as I'm sure you'd agree.
Why do you trust this guy's assertion on how many excess deaths there have been over the last two years, and their cause, more than the CDC's numbers?
I listened to the podcast again and he said he conducted serology studies pre-vaccine that indicate an overall lethality of 0.2% but 0.05% for everyone who isn’t 70 years old or whatever. That’s detection of antibodies with 0.05% false positive rate and then a follow up on death early on in the pandemic.
So one might point out that I changed my number from 0.02 to 0.2 and this is true. But what’s also true is that there’s a huge difference between 4% and 0.2%. And I was right to point out that 1-4% is bullshit. I feel mad because I remember hearing the 0.2% number all the way back at the start of the pandemic but everyone shouted it down. And here we are and it was right after all…
Let's for a moment assume your source is correct. If you were "right" to call out someone's "bullshit" because they were an order of magnitude high in their numbers, do you recognize that we were right to call out your bullshit for being an order of magnitude low with your number?
> SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level.
"Among patients" would make me assume that Stross is talking about case fatality rates, not infection fatality rates.
1-4% is a reasonable range for CFR, even if it's too high for IFR.
(Some quick Googling after the fact also shows that while MERS had a CFR in the 30-40% range, its IFR was estimated at more like 0.3-0.7% -- roughly the same range as COVID. Large numbers of undetected mild cases were cited as the reason for the large difference.)
If the current COVID death total isn't accurate, what would be your ballpark estimates for the real death and case totals in the US?
[1] - https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
> machine-learning model, which estimates excess deaths for every country on every day since the pandemic began. It is based both on official excess-mortality data and on more than 100 other statistical indicators
let me get the premise of this right: they built a "machine learning" model, using empirical data from normal years, and magical "statistical indicators", to predict excess deaths in a time of unprecedented events. Then, when the model does not fit, the conclusion isn't that the "model" is full of shit, but the "COVID deaths are undercounted"?
Sometimes you have to stop listening to what people say and get out your own tape measure/calculator. If not for yourself, so other people can take you seriously.
We have .25% of Americans officially dead from COVID so far. Not of infected Americans, of the general population. If not more person dies, "A Standford Professor" is already off by a factor of 12. Officially 1 in 5.7 of us (58m out of 331m) has been diagnosed, so even if there are people who got mild cases and didn't report, that number is likely to climb to anywhere between .7-1.4% of the overall population. Dead. In the ground. That's almost two orders of magnitude off. And if we cluster so much that hospital resources are exhausted, then that number will be higher.
When people don't want to agree with you, you have to be very very careful what statements and measures you use in your arguments. Because if you're off by a factor of X, then they will take what you say as hyperbole or outright lies. I'm not sure what X is, but it seems to be somewhere between 8 and 20.
If you say that I'm lying or stupid because the numbers I'm using are off by a factor of 3, then you look like a wackadoo if you substitute numbers that are off by a factor of 20 in the other direction.
Its why I keep comparing registered dead to the US population. That number is way below the actual rate, but until we learn that people are getting COVID three times and dying the second or third time, we can't have more than 331m people who have been exposed, so actual dead divided by population is a very, very pessimistic lower bar on the ratio. If my argument holds, or is even plausible, with the worst case version of my numbers, then the argument holds, even if that means I'm lowballing the priority of any actions I propose we take.
The latter can get us into plenty of trouble, and often does. But first you have to admit there's a problem before you can get any help (I solo a lot of things that I 'know' are a problem but can't sell anyone else on, and I deal with the consequences of that, but death is hardly ever on the line.)
Most people who die of a gun shot wound don't die instantly, they die from blood loss or organ failure. We write GSW on the certificate because the Rule of Law treats violent assault very differently from self-inflicted injuries. But if you're thinking like a longevity expert, it's bodily instability that is far more likely to kill you.
Covid has a lot of complications. But as an infectious disease, we can argue that we should treat it a bit more like an assault instead of an accident. Perhaps part of the disconnect in thinking between people is that not everyone agrees with that notion, and think of getting Covid like falling in the shower. It's my shower, and my body, if I'd rather die than install bars or get one of those stools then that's my perogative. Of course, your children probably disagree with this and tell you at least once per visit. In an overpopulated world maybe we let people go out their own way.
But you can't make someone else fall in that shower. You can make lots of other people die of Covid by being stupid.