[burger]

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

This times 1000.

A bigger issue is that there is a TON of "science"* coming out, and some of it is going to be wrong, for a variety of reasons.  Reasons like:
- bad analyses in non-peer reviewed papers
- people projecting their own biases onto data
- small sample sizes (e.g. comparison between Italy, China, and US mortality is essentially an N of 3; crappy choloroquine study, etc.)
- generalizing from early cases

My advice is to ignore the outliers.  When you see one scientist expresses an extreme opinion (like the virus outbreak is no big deal, or that the fatality rate from the virus is 0.05%), check and see what others are saying.  See what various country's health departments are saying.  And if the outlying opinion does not have support of a substantial number of scientists, ignore it.

*I'm using this term super generally to include all manner of papers, analyses, commentary, etc from scientists

[burger]

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

This times 1000.

A bigger issue is that there is a TON of "science"* coming out, and some of it is going to be wrong, for a variety of reasons.  Reasons like:
- bad analyses in non-peer reviewed papers
- people projecting their own biases onto data
- small sample sizes (e.g. comparison between Italy, China, and US mortality is essentially an N of 3; crappy choloroquine study, etc.)
- generalizing from early cases

My advice is to ignore the outliers.  When you see one scientist expresses an extreme opinion (like the virus outbreak is no big deal, or that the fatality rate from the virus is 0.05%), check and see what others are saying.  See what various country's health departments are saying.  And if the outlying opinion does not have support of a substantial number of scientists, ignore it.

*I'm using this term super generally to include all manner of papers, analyses, commentary, etc from scientists