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What have Francois Balloux, Anthony Fauci, Michael Levitt, Neil Ferguson and John Ioniddis and Toby Young got in common? Answer. They have all publicly stated calculations of infection fatality ratios that have differed by at least a factor of ten from other estimates.
Some, such as Toby Young have clearly been guilty of clumsy miscalculations. @toadmeister … it is very important to ensure that schools teach scientific notation. This can minimise such mistakes.
All miscalculations and mistaken projections based on multiplying raw population totals by an IFR are clearly very dangerous. They lead to either inflated or deflated estimates of the impact of pandemic.
However, the real problem lies with the IFR itself. What does an infection fatality ratio actually mean for a virus that is associated with such age specific mortality? A good argument can be made that the IFR itself should just be scrapped as a metric. It's as useful as GDP.
Just as GDP measures everything except that which really matters, so does the IFR. It is an aggregated measure of a disaggregated phenomenon. There is no measurable infection fatality ratio when applied to a “symdemic”, that kills in conjunction with other co-morbidities.
When infectious disease results in indiscriminate mortality of infected an IFR is appropriate… divide the number of infected people by the number of deaths. Few infected by Ebola would die during the time they are infected without it. Ebola is a unique cause of avoidable death.
However, this does not easily apply to a virus that is a contributing factor to mortality. The only way of determining the impact of SARS-Cov-2 on excess population mortality is to compare the impact of the virus with the number of deaths that would have occurred in its absence.
The fact that all the data needed has not been released in order for the un-confounded contribution to mortality risk to be calculated has led to a divisive and unproductive arguments over the true “lethality” of SARS-Cov-2.
The only way to end this divisive and unproductive debate is to release individual medical records for rigorous statistical analysis.
The records should include all co-morbidities for deaths registered with SARS-Cov-2 present and those without. An odds ration can then be calculated that expresses the true additional risk of death after being infected.
https://opensafely.org/ Could be a partial solution. However, it is only partially open and it is not being used by many researchers. Aggregated stats are being shown everywhere, while careful disaggregation is the key to deep understanding.
