Some observations on the faulty infection fatality rate assumptions which drove the push towards lockdown.
Ferguson's Imperial College paper, advocating lockdown, assumed an infection fatality rate in the UK of 0.9%.
Its source for this assumption was another paper by Ferguson.
This other paper admitted that there wasn't very good data available to estimate the threat posed by Covid-19.
To estimate IFR, you need to estimate how many infections there have been.
The best way to do that is with a randomised antibody test. Or as the paper said:
Since they didn't have an antibody test available, they used something else to estimate total infections.
They used the test for active infection (not the test for antibodies, or prior infection) that was used on people being repatriated from Wuhan. This is the PCR test.
That sounds like it might be useful, right?
It turns out that the test involved 689 individuals on six flights.
Six people tested positive:
These six people are the basis of estimating the number of infections in Wuhan.
And therefore the basis of estimating Wuhan's infection fatality rate.
Which was used to model the UK's IFR.
Which resulted in the estimate of 500k deaths in the UK.
Predicting 500,000 UK deaths (or 2.2 million US deaths) using 6 positive cases as your input data might seem odd.
But there's more.
The test gives an unknown number of false negatives. It's useless when there is no active infection.
TLDR: Ferguson used the output data from an unreliable test on a tiny sample size, which he admitted was not the right sort of test to begin with, to come up with the scenarios in which 500k British people and 2.2 million Americans died.
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These are the most important things I've learned, and which I apply in my day-to-day routine.
If everyone did these things, their lifestyles would be transformed:
1) assign every dollar (or pound, or euro) a specific job. Like a person, if money is left idle, it will get up to no good.
Do this every month with a written budget, preferably using an app that links to your bank accounts so that your transactions automatically show up there.
2) plan for your major expenses such as cars, holidays, and household improvements.
Putting cash aside for them every single month means not having to go into debt for them later (or liquidating your long-term investments, which is almost as bad).
The incoming auto-enrolment system in Ireland sounds horrible:
- a quasi-mandatory system, reducing take-home pay even more for employees.
- even higher costs for employers.
- a huge new govt subsidy for pensions (how can they afford to do this but not to cut income tax?)
1/5
- govt subsidies are applied equally regardless of tax bracket, so a pension becomes another form of income redistribution.
- money gets locked up in the system for 40+ years.
- new central processing authority to administer it, creating more unnecessary civil servant jobs.
2/5
- the existing PRSI deduction was already supposed to provide a decent pension. But there will be no change to PRSI.
- there will only be FOUR investment funds to choose from, for the entire country! An amazing lack of choice. Maybe let people invest their own money?
3/5
Ireland's "Commission on Taxation and Welfare" has triggered outrage with alleged proposals to reduce inheritance tax relief, raise diesel duty, etc.
As with NPHET, the likely purpose of COTW is to float bad ideas, so that government can see which ones are viable.
A short🧵.
Media reports have disclosed the alleged proposals from COTW, but have said almost nothing about who or what COTW is. The ordinary reader is left wondering who to blame for all of the bad ideas.
This is where I come in with a relevant link and a summary.
We can now calculate Ireland's death rates for every age group and for every year up to and including 2021, with the help of freshly released CSO figures and the CSO's population estimates.
I've done this. Some interesting results:
👇👇👇
Firstly, Covid-19 coincided with Ireland's 85+ population achieving their lowest ever death rates in each of the past two years.
An amazing result in the circumstances:
The results are only slightly less positive for the grey-haired 65-84 cohort.
Three out of the four categories here had a small increase in 2021 over the prior year.
But 2021 was still safer for every category in this cohort compared to 2018: