enter a giant:
17 Mar: StatNews: A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data
By John P.A. Ioannidis
At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected...
How long, though, should measures like these (lockdowns) be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?...
The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable...
This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future...
Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%...
A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat...
If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.”...
In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns...
One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.
In the most pessimistic scenario, which I do not espouse, if the new coronavirus infects 60% of the global population and 1% of the infected people die, that will translate into more than 40 million deaths globally, matching the 1918 influenza pandemic...
Conversely, with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake.
If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
Lipsitch freaks. speaks to Ioannidis and pens a response for StatNews the next day. admits Ioannidis is correct - there is no reliable data:
18 Mar: StatNews: We know enough now to act decisively against Covid-19. Social distancing is a good place to start
By Marc Lipsitch
(Marc Lipsitch, D.Phil., is professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics)
In a recent and controversial First Opinion, epidemiologist and statistician John Ioannidis argues that we lack good data on many aspects of the Covid-19 epidemic, and seems to suggest that we should not take drastic actions to curtail the spread of the virus until the data are more certain...
He is absolutely right on the first point...
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/18/we-know-enough-now-to-act-decisively-against-covid-19/
hacks at CBC try to give more weight to Lipsitch and others; clearly Ioannidis is rattling them:
19 Mar: CBC: Prominent scientist dares to ask: Has the COVID-19 response gone too far?
Leading epidemiologists publish duelling commentaries, igniting debate on social media
by Kelly Crowe
It’s a clash of titans — an epic battle between two famous scientists over the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In one corner, influential Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis, who wrote a commentary asking whether taking such drastic action to combat the pandemic without evidence it will work is a “fiasco in the making.”
Across the mat, prominent Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch punched back with a defiant response titled: “We know enough now to act decisively against COVID-19.”...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/coronavirus-covid-pandemic-response-scientists-1.5502423