It is also interesting to note the effects of simple things like vitamin-d which reduce the death rate (and sickness impact) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156757692...
Diabetes and other lifestyle related illnesses also impact the death rate to a high degree.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I was a fan of Ioannidis when he put out the estimates, but he has lost me since then. I'd rather go with the massive amount of researchers that have built their career studying these things, than the guy from a different field that feels he is better than everyone.
I mean, if your networks ops people are telling you the cause of a problem in your web application, and a manager comes in from another team and says he ran tcpdump and he thinks they are all wrong, and then the networks ops people show what he did wrong with tcpdump, but the manager sticks to his guns, who are you going to believe?
As our ERs, ICUs, and morgues were overwhelmed.
Which is still repeatedly happening, in regions with low vaccination and poor pandemic health regulations/orders. Except now it's lots of kids too young to get the vaccine or below age of being able to get the vaccine on their own without parental approval.
It would be exceedingly kind to say his "this isn't a big deal, not that many people percentage-wise are dying"...was at best incredibly heartless.
What I actually said was that he was an expert in research quality, and then promptly helped generate very shoddy research that was outside his area of expertise and ended up widely criticized by people actually in that field. Pointing that out is not ad hominem.
Extremely early-on in the pandemic he ran around shouting with no evidence that COVID was not very infectious and not deadly at all, and really, we needed to stop with these silly lockdowns and social distancing and masks and so on.
He then changed his tune to claim that actually covid was very infectious but this meant that the death rate was very low (and thus we needed to stop with these silly lockdowns and social distancing and masks and so on.)
Even his claim of very high infection / low mortality rate were true, it doesn't change the fact that ERs and ICUs have been repeatedly swamped, predominantly in countries, states and counties where political leaders are not employing standard pandemic control measures.
The man was literally shouting "THIS IS NO BIG DEAL STOP LIMITING OUR FREEDOM" while ERs and ICUs filled to the gills with dying people and in many places they literally could not burn the bodies fast enough.
His early claims were junk in part because COVID often was not mentioned or listed as cause of death, especially early in the pandemic.
PS:
> You're simply dismissing one of the most-cited scientists in the world
Appeal to authority. See? I can play that too. Maybe you can fool the average HNer into thinking citations imply credibility, but absolute junk research can end up highly cited because it was junk and many researchers sought to validate said research or pointed out its obvious flaws.
Next time, try arguing this stuff with someone who didn't work in a lab that was doing linguistic analysis of research, a project that existed because citation counts are completely worthless for identify novel research or evaluating its validity. And to head it off at the pass: yeeeeeees, even if you include journal impact factor.
He was right about the IFR for Covid-19, by the way. Subsequent research has upheld the finding. The primary factor that influences average IFR is the age of the population you're looking at:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554
> All systematic evaluations of seroprevalence data converge that SARS-CoV-2 infection is widely spread globally. Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries and locations.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1
> The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85. Moreover, our results indicate that about 90% of the variation in population IFR across geographical locations reflects differences in the age composition of the population and the extent to which relatively vulnerable age groups were exposed to the virus.