Fauci and Ferguson got it wrong?

[itwaseverthus]

This UK GP seems to show that the calculations which led to lockdown were way off by a factor of 10!

drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/09/04/covid-why-terminology-really-matters/?unapproved=176484&moderation-hash=ff1a297ff4f26e7148c6491b15a8b89e#comment-176484

By the way, my post above isn’t “defending him”... I’m simply saying that the numbers he arrived at
don’t seem too far from our current understanding of the potential impact of Covid based on actual
figures six months on. This would be the case whether he slept with another husband’s wife during lockdown, firebombed a nursery or boiled kittens alive.

Factor of 10 sounds about right. We were told the virus had an infection fatality rate of 3.4%. CEBM most recent estimate puts it between 0.3 and 0.5%

Fergussen models are frequently incorrect, he didn't even ought to be employed.

I know people like to say this but it appears not to be true when you look into it in more detail. To take one example, over mad cow disease he coauthored a paper predicting between a handful of deaths and millions, explaining in the next sentence that there wasn’t enough data to tell. The papers reported that he had predicted millions of deaths.

I've been following this from the beginning and the infection fatality rate has been estimated at 1% right back to the early WHO Wuhan based models.

If the infection fatality rate was 0.1%, then around 60,000,000 of the population would already have been infected, and we would have herd immunity.

It is hard to know where it is as we have no idea of the number of people already infected. I am sceptical it is as low as 6% and think some may retain T cell memory or other antibodies (not tested for).

Say we go for 12,000,000 infected (or, at least, exposed) and 60,000 deaths (based on excess deaths), we get an IFR of 0.5%.

If we, optimistically, assume that 60% confers herd immunity, that implies around 250,000 deaths, around what the modellers suggested.

It is not the plague but nor can it be treated as a cold or ‘the flu’.

Factor of 10 sounds about right. We were told the virus had an infection fatality rate of 3.4%. CEBM most recent estimate puts it between 0.3 and 0.5%

I don’t think this is right.

I am not sure where you heard 3.4% but the CEBM estimate is also regarded as too low. The issue with the IFR is that it defends entirely on the age and health distribution in the population who are catching it. So if at one stage it is largely care homes and then later it is largely young people, the IFR will change dramatically. You might be tempted to say the estimate was “wrong” when you see the change. What you really want is a figure that is broken down by age range at least. Those do exist now.

depends entirely...oops.

Fergusens models aren't respected and are treated with contempt by a lot of his peers, I don't understand how people still respect opinions of a man so discredited and wrong not once but nearly every time.

Just a gentle reminder that this is libel.

@larrygrylls

Yes, the actual figures six months in are consistent with the figures from the Fergusson model, whatever flaws it may or may not have had.

Weirdly this gets pointed out again and again and the posters goes quiet... Then it’s brought back again a few weeks later as a “newsflash”, generally with some absurd false equivalences that are meant to give weight to the accusation, but just make the poster look daft.

3.4% was the percentage given by WHO at the beginning of March and widely reported around 3rd to 6th March.

@KitKatastrophe

I don’t think there’s anyone who disputes that the 3.4% is way too high, and it has never been used as part of the UK or USA’s pandemic modelling

Are you confusing Case Fatality Rate with Infection Fatality Rate, KitKatastrophe?

CFR is how many people die out of the known cases, IFR is how many people die out of all cases. Whilst CFR can be calculated precisely, IFR can only be estimated.

This is from the February WHO report on Wuhan:

As of 20 February, 2114 of the 55,924 laboratory confirmed cases have died (crude fatality ratio [CFR2] 3.8%) (note: at least some of whom were identified using a case definition that included pulmonary disease).

That figure was never supposed to represent the IFR.

Just to reemphasise the subtleties when thinking about IFR or CFR, if you looked at Oman where 2.4% of the population is over 65 you would get a very different number compared to Italy where it is 23%.

This is not to say the numbers are useless but rather that it really matters exactly how the estimates are done and what you are comparing to.