Hardly.

If you are calculating the bounds on a ratio, then you use the smallest denominator you have to establish the upper bound, and the largest denominator to set the lower bound. That’s reported cases and the total population respectively.

The article claims that 0.15% have died. Basic math on the published statistics say at least 0.18% have died in the US, and 0.23% in Brazild, which last I heard is still in the grip of it. Sometimes you should put down your citations and look out the window.

The argument of the article is that people fucked up and we should get to the bottom of it. That The IFR of 0.9% was too high, it’s really 1/6th of that, which sounds pretty damning. It is not an accident when you bring up that actuals are multiples of predicted. The discrepancy is your hook, and a small error does not demand action (ie, let it go).

Hooks that lie are called manipulative.

The author is claiming a factor of 6 overestimation, and by the most cynical reading of the death statistics it cannot possibly be greater than 4, and in all likelihood is more like 2. Ie, let it go, and stop attacking disaster science.

No you're just making up numbers and picking outlier countries. If there is a more accurate estimate for worldwide IFR then please provide a citation.

For people who are curious about this and want to read further than the original Ioannidis and the Meyerowitz-Katz papers, here are two citations I found enlightening. The first is a frequentist analysis that is age-stratified, so is likely to control for the rather different age structures in different countries[1]. The second is a Bayesian approach[2]. Both seem pretty reasonable to me, and don't display obvious axes to grind.

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33289900/

[2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.12.21256975v...

1. GP is arguing that even assuming that the entire USA had been infected (ie, using the largest possible denominator), there were enough deaths for the IFR to exceed 0.15%.

2. 0.15% is not "the current best estimate", but an estimate by John P. A. Ioannidis who has published some remarkable sophistry at the beginning of the pandemic, which was (while not technically wrong) absurdly misleading IMHO.

I'd say best estimates for the IFR now a) acknowledge that it depends enormously on age (looks like a pretty exponential relationship), thus on the age structure of a country/state, and b) put it, for the US, say, between 0.2% and >1%.

There's a whole story about this.

The figure I most often cite is 0.68% from the study by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Lea Merone[1]. That paper is skeptical of serosurveys that show high incidence (see the discussion of reference 61, which is by Ioannidis).

Ioannidis responded with the paper you cited, the preprint of which contained a personal and unprofessional attack against Meyerowitz-Katz, removed from the published version, though a scientific critique remains. Meyerowitz-Katz responded on Twitter[2], mostly to the substantive critiques. There's more drama around this, with a number of prominent virologists taking M-K's side (see the Twitter threads).

Also see the PubPeer reviews for this paper[3], which contain more serious criticism of Ioannidis.

I go into detail here to make a few points. The main one is that, especially when there's legitimate scientific controversy, citing a single paper can really fail to give the whole picture. Another is that "the science" isn't one simple monolithic set of beliefs, even on such a seemingly basic statistical question, but is actually more of a conversation.

[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v...

[2]: https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1376304539897237508

[3]: https://pubpeer.com/publications/9FE142DA15F748FA283605C7201...