On other threads I criticized estimates of COVID-19's fatality. Here I'll highlight the best estimate I've seen:
0.9% from Neil Ferguson's team at Imperial College.
Ideologues often criticize the 0.9% estimate in order to downplay the severity of COVID-19 + evade policies they dislike. John Ioannidis resorted to that
And 0.15% IFR from the top of the thread fails because:
- it's a global IFR, while the Imperial College team's IFR was for Great Britain (IFR varies across populations)
- 0.15% is from a nonsensical paper by John Ioannidis
"Multianalyte serology in home-sampled blood enables an unbiased assessment of the immune response against SARS-CoV-2" nature.com/articles/s4146…
Context:
Public Health Agency of Sweden:
"Globally, it is estimated that 0.5–1 percent of those who are infected with COVID-19 die" web.archive.org/web/2020103000…
In the slide below, Ioannidis discusses age-specific IFR (infection fatality rate), i.e. what proportion of SARS-CoV-2-infected people die of the disease COVID-19 at various ages.