Re:Renewed questions about the virus, and hard-to-face answers
by allturtles on Monday June 28, 2021 @06:25PM
(#27669064)
Did you ignore the GP's first sentence? For 0.15% to be right either the death #s have to be significantly overinflated, or more than 100% of the U.S. population must have been infected with COVID.
0.5 and 0.27 are both larger #s than 0.15, so that supports the GP's point.
Re:Renewed questions about the virus, and hard-to-face answers
by nradov on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:08PM
(#27669958)
The 0.15% IFR estimate is a worldwide number. There is a significant variance between countries. Unfortunately Americans on average are older, sicker, and fatter so they tend to die more.
If one were to assume that everyone in these countries was infected and we are just really awful at reporting, that number is still wrong. But the US is currently reporting a hair over 1:10 people as having been infected, and Brazil has not crossed that threshold yet, so 0.15% is already empirically - to use the technical term - horse shit [1].
Your analysis is severely flawed from the fact that you are equating the number of "confirmed cases" with "number of infections," but many infections are never confirmed with a test (and indeed never even become symptomatic).
The article links to a source to support its 0.15% number, but some others are below:
Nature, estimates about 0.5% for USA: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
World Health Organization, median IFR of 0.27% (0.05% for those under 70): https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf