Sifting through news for "truth" - covid vs. flu question

Phronema · Jul 13, 2020

gzt said:
An early estimate of the case fatality rate was roughly that, but that's a point estimate and it's a case fatality rate. In other words, you take the number of identified deaths and divide by the number of identified cases, possibly with some correction for the fact of right-censoring. A responsible scientist, of course, will try to quantify the uncertainty in this estimate and provide a range of plausible values. Now, an infection fatality rate is different from a case fatality rate: it's the proportion of people infected who end up dying. The number of people infected is going to be larger than the number of identified cases, though sometimes we manage to get very good estimates of this. Very early on in the pandemic, we had the case of the Diamond Princess, with like 14 deaths out of 700 cases and a good bit of confidence that all the infections on the ship were detected. Which yields a point estimate of the IFR of 0.5%. Granted, the demographics of that ship are different from the population as a whole. I'm not sure what sources you were hearing that from early on in the pandemic so I can't comment in more detail. But 0.5% is not a surprising figure.

I agree with you there. I was just saying that it's lower than the percentage I remember originally being quoting was all.

SingularityOne · Jul 13, 2020

gzt said:
The Santa Clara study has been thoroughly criticized for its statistical and design-based failings, though their updates to it fixed some of its failings. Ioannidis kind of beclowned himself. Here are a couple chatty, web-log notes on them which explain some of the criticisms from somebody I take a lot of my approach to statistics from (note: I'm a statistician) Concerns with that Stanford study of coronavirus prevalence « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science and an updated note: Updated Santa Clara coronavirus report « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

EDIT: it seems a couple of days ago, he wrote up a substantial piece on this which will appear in JRSS series C, see here: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/specificity.pdf I have not read it but guarantee it's good.

Thank you! I’ll look these over.

~Anastasia~ · Jul 13, 2020

SingularityOne said:
I’m glad you’re mostly feeling better. I hope the rest of the symptoms (from stress, the virus, or both) clear up soon for you too. Yeah, I’m trying to find the middle path through all of this. It’s just been a lot trying to figure out who to trust through all of this tbh.

Thank you.

Yes I think I’m ok. I’m still going to get the heart checked out. I was in very good health before all this started, except being immunocompromised to a degree.

I’m hoping it’s just stress. I feel like I’m dealing with the situation pretty well overall (I feel sorry for true extroverts!) but ... I did get laid off, got a new job/career, semi-laid off from that one too, back in university classes, sick for an extended time, socially isolated, financial pressures, unavailability of goods in stores, OUT OF CHURCH FOR MONTHS, and just the world being the way it is. Even good changes are physiologically stressful. I just got my medical coverage taken care of again (another big worry) so yeah ... I’m going to get it checked out.

I’m feeling much better overall right now though. Thanks for the kind thoughts.

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Sifting through news for "truth" - covid vs. flu question

Phronema

Orthodox Christian

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SingularityOne

Well-Known Member

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~Anastasia~

† Handmaid of God †

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