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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

That is absurd, and little more than a platitude. Let's set the stage here:

  * I am not an epidemiologist
  * The authors of this study are not epidemiologists
  * The paper has not been peer-reviewed
  * The authors invent a new statistical method for estimating excess deaths, it is at odds with all other sources, and it just so happens to show no excess deaths from Covid until the vaccine is released

In situations like this, you should always default to disbelief.

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You are not coming across like you read the paper. Nor does it seem like you are making an argument in good faith.

I see a weird ad-hominem, appeals to authority and tradition, and some knee-jerk criticism. You haven't addressed legitimate criticism of your arguments, and you're all over this thread (6 of 44 comments) trying to convince people to dismiss this out of hand.

Your main criticism seems to be that the paper points out an anathema correlation, therefore warranting immediate disbelief and removal from discussion... Who are you, to make such a strong claim? Since when is that how discussions or science work, even if you were the world's top epidemiology / statistical method specialist?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'd say that with only reading the abstract, i gave this study a baysian 15% likelyhood. Then i read the first chapter, and it fell to .0015 or something like this.

I actually worked at a cloud provider dedicated to provide a lot of Ram and GPU ressources to researchers, and we worked with 'ARS grand Est' (think local CDC who coordinate hospital response and emergency allocation for all hospital, including private clinics, in a State) in March through june 2020. I've seen the numbers, I've read the rapports firsthand, before the French lockdowns, i imported the data files and seen the different number of reported death at Colmar compared to the biggest hospital of the Area (Strasbourg). There is no way this document is true. Want to be sure? Just look at Bergame vs Sienna, or even just Colmar vs Strasbourg in March/April 2020.

This is hugely unlikely.

Fair enough.

I've been in healthcare analytics and population health for over ten years.

Data analysis and analytics for going on 30.

I've also crunched a lot of numbers on this, and looked at the glaring issues with the data.

FWIW, I think that the analysis done in this paper is worth consideration.

I stopped after the first chapter, because to me, the likelihood of the article being true after that was too low.

If you evaluate this chapter and the abstract differently than I do (let's say 50% after the abstract because your are totally open minded unlike me, and 5% after the first chapter because it's really bad but you don't have the negative prior i have), and continue, maybe what's after is more compelling.

But to me, it's hogwash. Unless they write something better.

Data i found: https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/4641454

Video i found about my cousin hospital: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7sysei (English subtitles). They had to take beds from addictology services and registered two dozen more alcohol related deaths than in 2019.

The link i had on mortality in Grand Est hospital is now dead, but it was quite interesting.

You are discussing about France not Germany, right?

> In situations like this, you should always default to disbelief.

Thats some really unfortunate wording. None of this should be a matter of belief.

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