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Yesterday the @IrishTimes again published a #Covid19 piece that had not been fact checked. Piece by Martin Feely suggests the WHO had put forward a mortality of 0.1386%. This is untrue & this false claim was already directly addressed by WHO Oct 12th /1 https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1315997403762262016
The piece then refers to a a paper by "research expert Dr J Ioannidis which reports an overall Case Fatality Rate of 0.27%". But Ioannidis paper gave an IFR not CFR estimate of 0.27%, this is a significant error in itself as well as providing two contradictory estimates /2
WHO says IFR research converges on an IFR of 0.6% so both Martin's claims are misleading. The WHO bulletin is not a policy statement but collects research of interest, presumably the Ioannidis paper was interesting for being an outlier with low IFR but about that.. /3
Ioannidis is somewhat infamous for claiming early in the pandemic that IFR was 0.02-0.04%, about 1/10th of the current claim. He's one of a number of media savvy researchers who got a lot of airtime because their low IFR estimates aligned with business interests /4
His latest study still has an IFR less than half of the 0.6% the WHO says other research is converging on. The reason appears to be because of the way he selected what research he included and excluded in this review as detailed in this thread /5 https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1316511756148117505
All this is very complex which is all the more why the responsibility is on the so called paper of record to fact check pieces like this. It is not at all reasonable to expect the average reader to be able to do so, indeed the reader is not warned this hasn't been done /6
Martin opens with an ironic in the light of the above warning that much commentary is based on a "lack of understanding of Covid realities". Yet he goes on to question why cases are an important metric despite the very simple reality that they tell you how many are infectious /7
Cases also indicate how many people will be hospitalised in the future, will need ICU & perhaps most importantly how many will die. There is a very long lag between cases and deaths so a basic reality is that waiting for deaths to alert you would doom you to many many more /8
It's only 3-4 weeks after Leo suggested copying the 'cases don't really matter' approach Belgium had adopted but now the butchers bill for doing so has started to become clear as Belgium hits ICU number beyond what our public system has /9 https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1320683527399182336?s=20
Martin, after warning abt scaremongering goes on to undermine hope that vaccine is on the way or that it could make much of a difference. In fact vaccine findings are expected in the next 2-3 months with very large quantities already under production /10 https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1320669978144768001?s=20
He then misrepresents WHO again by claiming they say lockdowns don't work. This isn't correct, they correctly say they should be a last resort & the sort of testing to discover cases that Martin don't understand, along with the measures he opposes are 1st line of defence /11
He says "The number admitted to hospital in Dublin increased slightly over the past 4 weeks" when in fact over the last month those in hospital with Covid have increased a not very slight 350%. Again surely a claim that should have been fact checked by @IrishTimes /12
He hen again confuses CFR & IFR in the conclusion referring to a CFR for flu in 2018 that at 2.14% was "almost 10-fold higher than for Covid-19". The CFR for Covid in Ireland is not 0.214 but 3.3% - again fact checking should have picked this up /13
The only reason the 2018 flu has a CFR of 2.14% is precisely because unlike Covid only the sick were tested for it. If the same was applied to Covid19 the CFR in Ireland would be around 15-20%, it is lower only because those cases Martin didn't want counted are /14
Martin's article is an example of sunk costs fallacy, once someone takes a bad position they tend to dig further into it. That's his excuse but there really isn't an excuse for the last of fact checking by the Irish Times, and not for the first time https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1304429824950374402?s=20
The media have taken a similar infotainment approach on #Covid19 as they have to Climate Change. Instead of providing representative fact checked explainers of the science to enable public understanding they present this sort of debate with outlier positions for clicks /16
It doesn't even reflect the publics position, polls show that runs between 4 and 6 to 1 in favour of the restrictions. Creating an impression of a 50:50 debate only makes sense if you are a business lobbyist valuing profit over lives /17 https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1320362424244047874?s=20
And of course I forgot to link to the article itself, here it is https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/martin-feeley-hospital-admissions-don-t-justify-pressing-the-panic-button-1.4390870
On the subject of #Covid19 mortality, IFR, CFR & even PFR this thread looks at lot of the available evidence starting with the high PFRs seen in NYC & elsewhere make the low estimates of IFR Martin presents as fact very improbable https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1309505693733588992
