Am I one of the few people here who has looked at the covid-19 data and reached the conclusion that it’s probably only about as severe/fatal as seasonal influenza?
I have a longer blog post outlining the case here.
TLDR: CFR!=IFR, influenza CFR is similar to covid-19 CFR, and we know from influenza data that typically IFR << CFR due to enormous selection sampling bias from mostly testing only those with more severe disease. We can correct for that by comparing the covid-19 confirmed case age structure to the population age structure using uniform or age-dependent attack rate. The resulting IFR is similar to influenza, which is also the best fit for the Diamond Princess data (where selection bias is mostly avoided so CFR~IFR).
Selection bias can help explain why the CFR is higher in Italy, and probably why it’s so much lower in Germany (I’m looking for age structure data on covid-19 cases from Germany, I’m predicting it will be flatter than US or Italy data). South Korea is also another interesting case (which I found some data for but haven’t put into the blog post yet) - we can clearly reject a typical attack rate age structure there, which was surprising at first but then made sense given that the outbreak in SK started in a large tight-knit cult with a young median age and they tested everyone in the cult.
Anyway if anyone here has already encountered these thoughts and still believes covid-19 IFR is much higher than influenza IFR I’m curious what the best arguments/evidence are.
Am I one of the few people here who has looked at the covid-19 data and reached the conclusion that it’s probably only about as severe/fatal as seasonal influenza?
I have a longer blog post outlining the case here.
TLDR: CFR!=IFR, influenza CFR is similar to covid-19 CFR, and we know from influenza data that typically IFR << CFR due to enormous selection sampling bias from mostly testing only those with more severe disease. We can correct for that by comparing the covid-19 confirmed case age structure to the population age structure using uniform or age-dependent attack rate. The resulting IFR is similar to influenza, which is also the best fit for the Diamond Princess data (where selection bias is mostly avoided so CFR~IFR).
Selection bias can help explain why the CFR is higher in Italy, and probably why it’s so much lower in Germany (I’m looking for age structure data on covid-19 cases from Germany, I’m predicting it will be flatter than US or Italy data). South Korea is also another interesting case (which I found some data for but haven’t put into the blog post yet) - we can clearly reject a typical attack rate age structure there, which was surprising at first but then made sense given that the outbreak in SK started in a large tight-knit cult with a young median age and they tested everyone in the cult.
Anyway if anyone here has already encountered these thoughts and still believes covid-19 IFR is much higher than influenza IFR I’m curious what the best arguments/evidence are.