Iaonnidis's estimates of IFR in the 0.1% to 0.2% range were much closer to the mark.
The 0.1%-0.2% was just bad science, taking medians over countries with lagging statistics reports.
Where did you find 3.4%? Isn’t that an upper bound?
Here's a study from March 2020: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7118348/
> Adjusting for delay from confirmation to death, we estimated case and infection fatality ratios (CFR, IFR) for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the Diamond Princess ship as 2.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.89–6.7) and 1.3% (95% CI: 0.38–3.6), respectively. Comparing deaths on board with expected deaths based on naive CFR estimates from China, we estimated CFR and IFR in China to be 1.2% (95% CI: 0.3–2.7) and 0.6% (95% CI: 0.2–1.3), respectively.
Please provide specific, contemporaneous examples of the 3.4% estimate and evidence of it being "taken as gospel" and "driving the actual policy."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/05/coro...
That’s not IFR, and carries appropriate caveats literally in the same press release.
The “I can be trusted with scientific comprehension” crowd fails comprehension once again!
> A Feb. 28 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, co-authored by Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, took the position that the mortality rate may well fall dramatically. It said if one assumed that there were several times as many people who had the disease with minimal or no symptoms as the number of reported cases, the mortality rate may be considerably less than 1%. That would suggest “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza,” the editorial said.
There are many similar lines.
His early influential paper before that was way off and said IFR might be even lower, around the common cold.
Around 0.5%-1.5% IFR without overwhelmed hospitals was the common scientific consensus very early on and was more right. Some treatment methods like proning and demonstrated effectiveness of steroids in a certain schedule helped drop things a good bit a few months in, around 30% if I remember.
The problem is, that was not his estimate for the IFR. It was his estimate for the CFR.
He was predicting 10k dead in the US, which was off by two orders of magnitude. I don't know that anyone was further from the mark than him.
People need to get over their fertilization of contrarianism. Very often, the consensus view is correct.
Where. Source it.