Read on Twitter
A thread of some of the misconceptions that fed the COVID hysteria.
1/ Little reporting of the sense of scale, that flu and seasonal influenza-like infections (i.e., colds) are massive killers each year. Around half a million worldwide per year, with considerable regional and temporal variability. It’s “just a cold” only because we’re used to it.
2/ That flu is more dangerous for young/healthy than is COVID.
3/ An absence of understanding that colds are not uniformly spread over the year, but, like COVID, are similarly tightly peaked. Comparing to flu is NOT to compare a year of flu to a month of COVID. It’s same vs same.
4/ And, once one realizes the scale and peaked-ness of colds all prior years, one immediately sees that they subside on their own each year without lockdowns, social distancing, masks, or even better hygiene.
5/ While death is easily measurable, cause of death is deeply, even philosophically, complicated, and usually overdetermined. Flu deaths are done via models based. Counts of COVID have been based on some measurements, but also presumptions, with varying presumption standards.
6/ The best estimates of epidemic deaths are overall excess deaths relative to previous outbreaks. This cuts through all the complex “dying with” versus “dying of” issues.
7/ No appreciation that, because COVID19 is an off-season epidemic, it is not per se alarming that there are excess weekly deaths this year relative to the same weeks in other years. A mild outbreak in summer would have VERY significant excess deaths relative to other summers.
8/ Little communication that epidemics often have spatial hotspots, and one can’t extrapolate those to everywhere. Nor can one point to excess deaths in THAT city relative to other years, because previous epidemics may have had other hotspots.
9/ There was no skepticism on apocalyptic model projections. Models are, even at their best, little more than bullshit. And certainly never as good as the inputs provided, which were off even compared to what was reported at the time at places like Oxford’s CEBM.
10/ A massive lack of distinction between case- & infection- fatality rates. CFR is % dying among those measured w/ disease, often the most sick, who showed up to the hospital. IFR is the % dying of those infected, and usually is orders of magnitude lower. https://twitter.com/MarkChangizi/status/1260645292631719936?s=20
11/ Little appreciation of age stratification, that the young have a couple orders of magnitude lower risk than those old with comorbidities. That IFRs are most sensible when contextualized by age and underlying conditions. Not so useful as a single number.
12/ Once the false rumor that COVID is deadly to the young was (partially) extinguished, it was described as “targeting the old and sick.” The old and sick are who a virus kills when it does NOT target. In fact, *independent of age*, COVID adds an extra month or so of risk.
13/ Those arguing to calm down were not saying COVID is not dangerous. It is a new wolf among the colds, and adds new risk. But it is a level of risk we regularly deal with for other viruses, not to mention for all the other risks in life.
14/ This does not get into people’s misconceptions on “freezing the economy.” https://twitter.com/MarkChangizi/status/1261025298168020993?s=20
15/ Nor does it get at the bizarre, but nearly universal, belief that lockdowns were obviously sensible precautions. https://twitter.com/MarkChangizi/status/1254796958964858882?s=20
