Context: Obviously wrong to pooh-pooh the idea of 400,000 deaths.
But also wrong in promoting the urban legend that projections warned it could be 2.2 million. This number was an implausible worst case scenario with no mitigation at all. reason.com/2020/03/30/as-…
Lots of people seem to think Fauci promoted such figures. Not so.
March 15: Fauci was asked about a NYT report of a 1.7 million deaths worst-case scenario. He replies that won't happen because of the mitigation already occurring.
The first prediction Fauci offered (while emphasizing that models may not be accurate!) is that 100K-200K would die. This was based on IHME modelling for deaths on August 4. Actual number dead on that date? 157K.
Context: Bizarre that so many folks are misrepresenting such a milquetoast document to mean something sinister. It doesn’t say anything like this. Just read damn thing!
It's not even new. The prior version of the document already said “patients with high levels of circulating virus (viral load), relatively few cycles will be needed to detect virus and so the Ct value will be low.” archive.is/FkKlq
Contrary to Julia, calling out dangerous misinformation *does* help his constituents. And while doing this certainly could be a full-time job, as a hobbyist debunker myself, it only takes a little knowledge of how the internet works to dig up deleted tweets.
Context: They're an odd belief that all deaths are being classified as COVID-19. Untrue. All of the normal sorts of deaths are still occurring at about the same rate.
The flu is indeed very low, as confirmed by testing, but the mitigation measures taken against COVID are even more effective against the flu (which is less infectious).
Context: Context: 11.9 million doses of vaccines have been administered. And over 7 million a week ago. If you picked 7 million Americans at random about 160 of them would die within 24 hours. This is far fewer deaths than you'd expect by chance. bloomberg.com/graphics/covid…
Across the Moderna and Pfizer studies, *more* people died in the control group than the vaccine group. When you select millions of people, some will happen to die.
Context: Vaccine efficacy means that 94%+ of those who take the vaccine in the trial don't even get sick—won't even have a chance of being among those who die from COVID-19. It's like improving your odds from 1-in-1000 to 1-in-20,000. businessinsider.com/what-is-vaccin…
Moreover, the IFR for COVID-19 higher than that; closer to 0.6% overall and maybe ~0.25% for someone Jim's age. Common sense says you don't want to be in a room of 400, where someone gets killed.
Context: A month ago Jon Miller posted a table that claimed deaths would be down in 2020, which was repeated by Kyle Becker and others. I pointed out it was nonsense. Kyle doubled-down.