He seemed to have plenty of hard science to cite in his hours long conversation with lex fridman, MIT alum and lecturer. It’s available for anyone to watch. If later on it becomes clear I was spreading wrong information then I’ll own up to it.
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.)