03-21-2020, 10:39 AM
With coronavirus, life comes at you fast. The situation in Italy has already disproven Ioannidis theory. At this point, the death rate in Italy due to coronavirus is 600 per day and still rising (and it may be an underestimate):
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-healt...SKBN2152V0
Total deaths in Italy last year were about 600,000 (death rate of about 1%), so if you do the math the daily background death toll is about 1,600. For Ioannidis theory to be right, the Covid-19 death toll would have to be in essence produce a rounding error (<10% increase) in the number of daily deaths. And yet if you have a background rate of 1600/day, the 600/day would be 27% of all the deaths in Italy. Even if some deaths that would have happened anyways are reclassified as Covid related because patients test positive even though they would have died anyways, there’s the fact that as the article I linked shows, a lot of people may be dying from Covid-19 without anyone knowing, and in the most affected areas, the number of deaths may be three times expected.
I have a lot of respect for Ioannidis, and his skepticism has been very important for the field of medicine (not to mention genetics and nutritional science). But even well-respected scientists can be wrong during a fast-moving pandemic, and I think in this case, John is going to regret having written that.
BC
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-healt...SKBN2152V0
Total deaths in Italy last year were about 600,000 (death rate of about 1%), so if you do the math the daily background death toll is about 1,600. For Ioannidis theory to be right, the Covid-19 death toll would have to be in essence produce a rounding error (<10% increase) in the number of daily deaths. And yet if you have a background rate of 1600/day, the 600/day would be 27% of all the deaths in Italy. Even if some deaths that would have happened anyways are reclassified as Covid related because patients test positive even though they would have died anyways, there’s the fact that as the article I linked shows, a lot of people may be dying from Covid-19 without anyone knowing, and in the most affected areas, the number of deaths may be three times expected.
I have a lot of respect for Ioannidis, and his skepticism has been very important for the field of medicine (not to mention genetics and nutritional science). But even well-respected scientists can be wrong during a fast-moving pandemic, and I think in this case, John is going to regret having written that.
BC