An NPR report suggests the global response to COVID-19 may have been based on a flawed assumption about the volatility of COVID19. We already know that the model used to initially predict infection and death rates was completely flawed, and now discredited, along with the modeler Neil Ferguson of London’s Imperial College.
Back in 2005, Ferguson claimed up to 200 million might die from the Avian flu, but in reality, only about 100 did. In March 2020, Ferguson was queried by The New York Times with the question: “what the best-case scenario was for the US during the COVID pandemic?”
“About 1.1 million deaths,” he said. So far, as of this writing, 154,471 deaths have been recorded according to the CDC.
Ferguson’s model numbers overreached reality by about a factor of ten.
From the report: (bold mine)
Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared.
The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person’s blood rather than the virus itself.
The tests are finding large numbers of people in the US who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous.
“The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
That’s in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person’s body.
Basically, the “nanny state” politicians decided to shut down the global economy to protect people from a contagious virus that has resulted in no symptoms or mild symptoms for up to 90 percent of the people who contracted it.
This will eventually go down as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, scientific and political blunders of the 21st century. The so-called “climate emergency” is a close second.
Anthony ==> Are you shure you have the right link? Th NOR reportis from 28 MAY 2020!
Yes, I’m sure I have the right link.
From the above article’s first sentence: “. . . flawed assumption about the volatility of COVID19.”
Shouldn’t the word “lethality” replace “volatility”? Or am I missing something important here?
Should I worry about:
1. COVID-19 changing rapidly and unpredictably, especially as regards its emotions?
2. Evaporating at much lower (or much higher) temperatures/pressures than presently believed?
3. COVIS-19 being listed and actively traded on one of the major commodity exchanges?
Of course, I can make allowance for this because I know that Anthony has been dealing with MUCH larger issues over the last several weeks . . .
“”The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
That’s in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person’s body.
And the revised estimates support an early prediction by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force. In an editorial published in late March in The New England Journal of Medicine, Fauci and colleagues wrote that the case fatality rate for COVID-19 “may be considerably less than 1%.”
This is not news
No kidding, if they didn’t kill so many people in nursing homes we would be yawning over Covid.
It would have been less deadly and less harmful with proactive treatment (e.g. HCQ+Zn+AZ) to mitigate disease progression, without Planned Parent, with emigration reform, enforcing confentional hygienic habits to reduce cross-contamination in medical facilities etc., and controlling social contagion to limit runs on providers.
Deadliest rate I’ve seen is about One in Eight-Point-Five-Million.
It’s more than three orders of magnitude behind dying from old age without co-morbidity.
If the vulnerable were extremely locked down ( only the ones willing to be ) and the rest of society placed on no restrictions herd immunity would be reached very fast and fatalities would be low. Especially now with doctors having much better therapies. This boils down to a fairly simple exercise in optimization.
From the article: “An NPR report suggests the global response to COVID-19 may have been based on a flawed assumption about the volatility of COVID19. We already know that the model used to initially predict infection and death rates was completely flawed, and now discredited, along with the modeler Neil Ferguson of London’s Imperial College.
Back in 2005, Ferguson claimed up to 200 million might die from the Avian flu, but in reality, only about 100 did. In March 2020, Ferguson was queried by The New York Times with the question: “what the best-case scenario was for the US during the COVID pandemic?”
“About 1.1 million deaths,” he said. So far, as of this writing, 154,471 deaths have been recorded according to the CDC.
Ferguson’s model numbers overreached reality by about a factor of ten.”
Well, President Trump’s Wuhan virus computer model was right on the money.
President Trump used the figures of 100,000 to 140,000 mitigated deaths (social distancing at 50 percent), and up to 2.2 million deaths if no mitigation was taken.
Trump’s model hit right about in the middle of the 100,000 to 140,000 educated guess with around 125,000 deaths by the time the lockdowns were lifted.
Since the lockdowns were lifted, the new estimate is that there will be about 250,000 total mitigated deaths by the end of the year.
I saw Sean Hannity say on tv yesterday that all the models were junk. Wrong Sean. Trump’s model wasn’t junk.
From the article: “The tests are finding large numbers of people in the US who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous.”
How does the claim that even mild cases of the Wuhan virus may cause serious longterm adverse health effects figure into this “appears less dangerous” assertion? My guess is it wasn’t figured in, otherwise the author would not have made that assertion.
160,000 dead
1000 dead per day
“it is what it is”
From the article: “Basically, the “nanny state” politicians decided to shut down the global economy to protect people from a contagious virus that has resulted in no symptoms or mild symptoms for up to 90 percent of the people who contracted it.
This will eventually go down as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, scientific and political blunders of the 21st century.”
I don’t agree. We knew nothing about this virus in the beginning. Had it been as lethal as the Ebola virus, the author wouldn’t be making all these claims. He would be wondering why we didn’t lockdown harder and longer.
Making judgements “after the fact” is real easy. Anyone can do that.
Making judgements “before the fact” is what is difficult and is what takes leadership.
There are lots of Monday-morning quarterbacks. They knew/know just how things should have gone. Too bad they didn’t weigh in at the beginning of the pandemic.
But of course, they couldn’t weigh in because they didn’t know any more about the Wuhan virus than anyone else. But, now that they do, they are more than happy to opine on what should have been done. Too little, too late. Thanks for nothing. Quit whining.
It made sense to take serious measures in the early days when the Chinese were treating this as SARS 2.0 and we knew it shared a lot of genetics with that disease. But few governments were willing to take such measures at that time, like closing down international travel, so they tripled-down once the disease hit the West and locked everyone up.
But it wasn’t long after that that we finally got some useful information about spread and severity from the Diamond Princess, and once we knew that the fatality rate was only about 1% in a population that was significantly older than normal, it was clear this wasn’t a disease which needed such measures. Governments should have locked down care homes and other vulnerable people and relaxed all the other measures… but once they’d gone down that path, few governments wanted to come back.
Now the free money is coming to an end, people are starting to notice that the economy has been wrecked and not many people are dying. And they’re going to be pissed when they realize how badly governments mismanaged this thing.
As I’ve said before, my perception of all this has not changed since day one — H U G E ! … over reaction !!
Now it’s just getting stupider and stupider. HUGELY stupid, in other words. HUGELY
Did I mention HUGELY ?
Here’s some good OT news, hot off the press: Gallup poll says about 84 percent of those polled think the Leftwing Media is responsible for the divisions in the United States. Maybe there’s hope afterall ! 🙂
I recall seeing some video of people walking in public spaces in China and all were masked, yet the software associated with the video showed indentification symbols around every face on the screen. Masks obviously did not hide their identify. I hear some software can recongnize you by looking at the back of your head, once they acquire your picture.
The goal must be to scare people.
Why no-one can ever recover from COVID-19 in England – a statistical anomaly.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/why-no-one-can-ever-recover-from-covid-19-in-england-a-statistical-anomaly/
AW writes
Back in 2005, Ferguson claimed up to 200 million might die from the Avian flu, but in reality, only about 100 did.
I’m not sure Ferguson did claim this. I believe he was speculating on what might happen if the Avian Flu virus evolved by which it could be transmitted between humans. That’s a completely different scenario.
I’m not a fan of Ferguson but we need to be fair. Ferguson has developed a model which he ran under a range of scenarios & assumptions. These were the best ‘guesses’ at the time, e.g. IFR of 0.9% and fully susceptible population. We hoped IFR would be lower and that some of the population had prior immunity but no-one knew for sure.
As it happens his predictions for the UK – given the mitigating action taken – were close to the mark.
I would criticise the model for it’s lack of sophistication. The results are too similar to those produced from a basic SIR model. Ferguson may have allowed for some geographic separation but, as Nic Lewis pointed out, apart from that there is very little heterogeneity assumed. That said, I think Nic’s estimate for Herd Immunity threshold is very optimistic.
This, unfortunately, sums up the debate. Ferguson gets hammered while ‘experts’ on the other side get a free pass. We lack true scepticism.
“Professor Neil Ferguson’s modelling which warned 500,000 people could die from coronavirus and prompted Britain to go into lockdown.”
Didn’t know UK had half a million deaths?
Trump is getting hammered all day everyday even though with a much more complex situation and a huge country to deal with the US has done better than most European countries all you have to do is look at the deaths per Million. That’s with the US incentivising reporting death as Covid caused when they are really in many cases not.
If Trump was smart he would use all the news outlets saying models predict 2,000,000 could die! and show how well we have actually done in comparison.
“given the mitigating action taken”
Which actions were useful?
Well, duh.
Top 10 USA states by deaths per million population all Democrat run states. NY, NJ, Mass, Conn, RI, Louisiana, District of colombia, Michigan, IL, Delaware.
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I think this article and the comments are a perfect slice of the greater population.
I’ve said it since the beginning and I’ll say it again here: We simply don’t know until reliable antibody tests are widely conducted and the data analyzed without noise is analyzed.
One comment struck me greatly: factor out the noise. How much of these numbers that we have is noise? We don’t know. How many people actually died OF this virus and subsequent disease? We don’t know. How many deaths were brought about by incorrectly assuming ventilators would be the answer? We don’t know. How many were saved by being intubated? We don’t know. Why? IMO–lack of standardization. Reporting is not standardized even in counties of the same state, heck from town to town in some places. HOW can it not be standardized? All that leads to is inference and fear of the unknown.
JMHO here, but until we clean the standardized data properly for analysis and use that for training a predictive model, this will turn into a witch hunt against anyone that doesn’t wear a mask in public and could degrade into “immunity” and those without them being shunned from taking part in economic recovery.
Actually, his prediction was 500,000 UK deaths *if no action was taken to limit the spread of the virus”
So far 46,364 persons have died in the UK (who tested positive for the virus).
307,184 have tested positive for the virus (and the UK testing regime is completely pathetic, with many contracts for testing given on the basis of “mates first, competent second”).
So far over £100 million has been given to companies for various covid functions, mainly they are owned by ruling political party friends and donors!!
A complete 4000 bed temporary hospital was built, BUT NO STAFF EXISTED TO ENABLE IT TO BE USED! They even considered instantly qualifying army grunts as nurses to be able to use the beds!
So far, in excess of 1000 NHS medical staff have died from the disease, with several thousand having various stages of illness.
How you doing over there?
As highlighted by a John Helmer article: http://johnhelmer.net/no-second-wave-pandemic-in-russia-pavel-volchkov-russian-leader-in-genomic-engineering-he-rejected-harvard-for-moscow-explains-why/
Several European studies utilizing ELISPOT testing showed that actual COVID-19/nCOV exposure is 200% to 300% higher than antibody testing shows.
This is because someone with a mild/asymptomatic case of nCOV won’t necessarily generate high levels of antibodies. Also, someone who was exposed a significant time in the past may have lost their antibodies.
The thesis behind Volchkov’s comments above is that the true immunity to nCOV comes from T-cell and B-cell memory – which is what ELISPOT checks.
Which in turn means that a lot more people were exposed to nCOV in the hotspot states/nations than anyone thinks. This is furthermore consistent with the rapidly dropping numbers of deaths per million, per day in those areas.
In contrast, the states and nations which locked down and/or were never exposed – they are seeing no/minimal reduction in deaths. Look at California for example.
So it seems we already have herd immunity in some areas.
Until we get a vaccine tested, approved, manufactured, distributed and administered – for which another year seems highly optimistic in the US – the current lockdown plans seem increasingly pointless and overall destructive. Nor is the US exhibiting any form of skill with contact tracing/testing/quarantine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3040253/
I wrote the following on March 23, 2020 in response to a Yahoo article titled:
Harsh Steps are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say
“I predict that when we we do an after action analysis we will find that this virus has been around for quite some time and that many people have been infected without serious symptoms. If you Google “history of AIDS” you will find that it was likely in the US for 20 years before we figured out it was here. COVID-19 spreads more quickly than AIDS, but I have no doubt it’s been around longer than we know now. What that means is …. it is nowhere near as deadly as some people fear. If 10 out of 100 people diagnosed with the disease die, that is very deadly. But, if there are 10,000 people with the disease who have not been diagnosed, that’s 10 deaths out of 10,100 cases. That is more like the flu, not something to ignore, but not something to panic about either.”
My wife says I can have something of a “superior” attitude at times, but I think if you are consistently right when others are wrong, the attitude is justified even if it isn’t popular.
Has now been done in Italy and Spain. More than 60k participants each, representative for the whole country and population demographic. Infection fatality rate in Spain was ~1.2%, in Italy ~2.3% calculated from confirmed COVID-19 deaths not general excess mortality. Both nations have additional >10k more excess deaths than normal that have not been officially attributed to COVID-19. That would make the IFR even higher.
“Both humoral and cellular immune responses are impaired in aged individuals, leading to decreased vaccine responses. Although T cell defects occur, defects in B cells play a significant role in age-related humoral immune changes. The ability to undergo class switch recombination (CSR), the enzyme for CSR, AID (activation-induced cytidine deaminase) and the transcription factor E47 are all decreased in aged stimulated B cells” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3040253/
Our local casino just started requiring us to remove our mask and look at the camera when we enter, then put the mask back on. I surmise that their software does not recognize us with the mask on. They need to be able to keep people out that are on their naughty list and they would like to be able to identify us if we are naughty while there.