Regardless, as I said before, demanding that some kind of study be provided to prove that asymptomatic infection is prevented by natural immunity is so far beyond what we know about any other virus that it borders on the hysterical.
This virus is significantly worse than the 1957 or 1968 flu, causing many more hospitalizations and deaths despite much stronger countermeasures. But those two were indeed quite deadly, worse than seasonal flu, and if a similar flu emerges in the future it should be treated extremely seriously. Hopefully we can learn from our severe systematic mistakes in the Covid pandemic to better prepare for and react to future pandemics of flu and other pathogens.
The 1957 flu had less than half the IFR of Covid. It infected a smaller percentage of the world population than Covid is likely to, despite much less significant public health countermeasures, and a tremendous increase in medical knowledge in the past half century. It was likely significantly less contagious.
Death estimates in the USA are in the 100k range, vs. Covid which has already killed more than 400k (if we count using a similar estimation method) and will likely kill at least 200k more before it is through. (US population has more than doubled in the mean time, but we are talking about at least 5–8x as many deaths.) The difference in hospitalization rate is dramatic.
It is really tragic that the abject failures of the US federal response have made partisans so heavily invest themselves in the claim that Covid is no big deal and we shouldn't worry about it.
> Globally, the 1957 flu caused about 1M excess deaths. Currently, Covid is attributed to ~2M deaths
No, this is a disingenuous apples-to-oranges comparison. One is a post-epidemic estimate by independent epidemiologists, while the other is a confirmed-positive-death count subject to contemporaneous political pressure and institutional inability to confirm every Covid death.
The contemporaneous confirmed death numbers from any seasonal or pandemic flu are always many times lower than the final estimate, and decades ago it was probably at least an order of magnitude lower. The discrepancy won't be quite as dramatic with Covid today, because a tremendous effort has been made around the world to get Covid tests to hospitals. But it will still be a very significant undercount.
After a couple years once experts have had time to gather and crunch the numbers, the number of Covid deaths from a comparable kind of best-guess estimate is going to double or more. Even in the USA, we are probably missing on the order of 150–200k Covid deaths so far from our confirmed death counts. And the situation is broadly comparable in Europe. But many less developed countries have much less capacity for gathering and reporting accurate numbers, and only a tiny fraction of Covid deaths are being reported in many places.
> One is a post-epidemic estimate by independent epidemiologists, while the other is a confirmed-positive-death count subject to contemporaneous political pressure and institutional inability to confirm every Covid death.
...as well as almost certain over-counting due to extremely liberal criteria for "Covid deaths" (e.g. deaths within 30 days of a positive test, which is the standard in many areas.)
Point being: there's uncertainty on the "confirmed-positive death count" in both directions and you're assuming that it's a strict lower bound.
Just today, the WSJ published an excess-death study that put the number at 2.8M, worldwide (or 3.5/10,000):
Higher than the JHU numbers, but still within reasonable statistical error of the 1957 pandemic estimates.
> After a couple years once experts have had time to gather and crunch the numbers, the number of Covid deaths from a comparable kind of best-guess estimate is going to double or more. Even in the USA, we are probably missing on the order of 150–200k Covid deaths so far from our confirmed death counts.
Well, now you're just making things up. Also, again: see the WSJ study above. Even if you count every excess death this year as Covid...it's about the same as the 1957 flu season.
covid-19 is not 5 times deadlier than the flu. It is about twice.
The IFR sits at ca 0.19. Flu is about 0.1.
Covid scare-mongers using inaccurate and outright false data to cause panic, terror and so much confusion that the public is left to choose what to ignore and what to follow, are causing much more damage than covid deniers are.
The fear of going to the hospital among people with other ailments come to mind.
There was an article in Nature the other day on the 300% increase in stillbirths in UK due to lack of in-person pre natal care. Another delightful side effects of the extreme fear propaganda.
No one listened to the idiot deniers anyway. They never were the problem.
0.19% is much lower than even the low bound of consensus scientific estimates; the Ionnidis paper on which he bases these estimates has also received significant direct criticism. In my opinion Ioannidis is a disingenuous hack who has thoroughly discredited himself during this pandemic, and from what I can tell his agenda-driven Covid punditry is popular on Fox News and Breitbart but not taken seriously by professional epidemiologists.
The US CDC's best estimate of IFR as of a planning scenaario document from September was 0.5% for people aged 50–70, and 5.4% for people aged 70+. (This is not the best source available, but miscellaneous journal papers could be criticized as cherry-picked.) Adjusted population IFR varies from place to place, depending on the proportion of seniors, people with pre-existing health problems, access to medical care, etc., but nowhere in the US is it as low as 0.19%.
If you want a credible widely cited meta-analysis, try e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1 from December which calls Covid "far more dangerous than influenza", and estimates the IFR to be at least 5–10x higher.
> The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85.
> As shown in Fig. 6, population IFR (computed across all ages) ranges from about 0.5% in Salt Lake City and Geneva to 1.5% in Australia and England and 2.7% in Italy.
> Supplementary Appendix O: [We estimate that during winter 2018–19] the population IFR for seasonal influenza was in the range of 0.04% to 0.08% – an order of magnitude smaller than the population IFR for COVID-19.
* * *
> increase in stillbirths in UK
The UK has royally screwed up most aspects of pandemic response. Just like Brexit and everything else the Tories have had their hands on in the past few years. You don't see the same problems in other wealthy island nations like New Zealand or Taiwan.
(With the notable exception that the UK has done a decent job sequencing a large collection of viral samples.)
> Across 51 locations, the median COVID-19 infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%): the rate was 0.09% in locations with COVID-19 population mortality rates less than the global average (< 118 deaths/million), 0.20% in locations with 118–500 COVID-19 deaths/million people and 0.57% in locations with > 500 COVID-19 deaths/million people. In people < 70 years, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% with crude and corrected medians of 0.05%.
But this is a meaningless debate. Your own preferred source makes it clear that the "average IFR" is heavily dependent on population demographics (i.e. in the very next sentence after the one you quoted:
> our results indicate that about 90% of the variation in population IFR across geographical locations reflects differences in the age composition of the population and the extent to which relatively vulnerable age groups were exposed to the virus
You're also completely misinterpreting Figure 6 from that paper. It is showing that their model of age-specific IFR correlates well with observed differences in reported IFRs. It is not claiming that those reported values are meaningful in the absolute -- in fact, all of the "reported" values seem to be higher than the model by a factor of ~2-4, and they're substantially higher than the numbers cited by the WHO bulletin.
(and yes, I know you don't like Ioannidis, but this is a metareview, not original research. Also, not liking someone doesn't make them wrong.)
Well, no, actually. This virus is roughly on par with the 1957 pandemic in terms of IFR and per-capita fatality rate:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemi...
Regardless, as I said before, demanding that some kind of study be provided to prove that asymptomatic infection is prevented by natural immunity is so far beyond what we know about any other virus that it borders on the hysterical.