Claiming that IFR "is between 0.5 and 1.0%" is incorrect and only helps advocates of herd immunity. IFR with optimal healthcare (!) is between 0.5 and 1.0%. IFR without is much higher.
@C_Althaus @marcelsalathe @itosettiMD_MBA @EckerleIsabella
@C_Althaus @marcelsalathe @itosettiMD_MBA @EckerleIsabella
Providing IFR estimates if hospital capacity is overwhelmed is not difficult. French data is available with hospitalizations, ICU and deaths according to age group. Even if we "only" consider that without hospital care, all ICU patients would die, IFR in young people skyrocket.
If we take antibody studies from places where hospital capacity was partially (!) overwhelmed, like Spain, Madrid or some places in Bergamo province, and use excess mortality figures (testing of the dead was often not possible), we get IFR of 2%. But nobody ever mentions this.
Why is this important? Advocates of herd immunity wrongly believe that if we lift all lockdowns and limitations, IFR would be still low. Even 0.5-1.0% is not a problem for them. They believe that only very old people and very sick people would die. That's what many experts claim.
Experts must explain that if we stop all measures, hospitals would be overwhelmed and even many younger people, among whom now almost all survive thanks to good care, would not get ICU bed and would be sent home to die.
Another important misunderstanding: Some advocates of herd immunity understand that we must keep infections below hospital capacity, but believe that this can be achieved through less restrictive measures than keeping number of cases very low, as we do now. This is incorrect.
Even keeping case number below hospital capacity still requires R~1. Most measures have got same impact on R no matter what incidence rate, but not so testing-tracing, which is much more efficient with low number of cases. Unfortunately, no models integrate this feature.
Consequently, keeping R close to 1 requires more restrictive measures with high number of daily new cases than with a very low number of daily new cases. Why does nobody explain this?
I think that in the COVID-19 task force of the German Interior Ministry, we explained that well in our March 22 paper, and managed to silence advocates of herd immunity for some time (C. Drosten, Jens. Spahn, Helge Braun, etc.).
fragdenstaat.de/blog/2020/04/0…
zeit.de/2020/15/horst-…
fragdenstaat.de/blog/2020/04/0…
zeit.de/2020/15/horst-…
Then all this was forgotten again, and communication became a disastrous failure. There is a lot of other research which must be done to explain the necessity of containing this virus, but nobody does it. Why?
