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Andreas Backhaus Profile picture
@AndreasShrugged
Jul 12, 2021 • 10 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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Call me pedantic, but I insist that journalists need to know the difference between case fatality rate, infection fatality rate, and mortality rate when making big statements about Covid. @dwallacewells mixes these up, resulting in an unsupported claim. @NYMag @intelligencer
So the first part is correct, as provided by the source: COVID-19 IFR for children aged 5-9 not higher than 0.001%. Note the same is not true for the younger children aged 0-4 and older ones aged 10-14.
nature.com/articles/s4158…
So what "about one-tenth the risk of flu in that age group"? The source claims a COVID-19 "mortality rate" of 0.009% in Florida and a flu "mortality rate" of 0.01% for the age group 14 and younger. It also says/quotes that 0.009% is "far below" 0.01%(???).
healthleadersmedia.com/covid-19/true-…
First, the age group from the Covid IFR 5-9 age group isn't the same as the age group considered for these "mortality rates". Second, what about the "mortality rates"? Here's where it gets complex. Following the source within the source...
...leads us to a FL report featuring this table. We can calculate a COVID-19 "mortality rate" by adding the deaths (0+3) and dividing them by cases (22218+9357), which indeed yields 0.009(5)%. But that's not a mortality rate, that's a case fatality rate!
floridadisaster.org/globalassets/c…
A case fatality rate (CFR) is larger than an IFR because it counts only cases, not infections; both are larger than mortality rates, which divide deaths by population. This Covid-19 CFR is 9X larger than the Covid-19 IFR we just saw at the beginning. But where's the flu?!
Turns out there isn't a source for the 0.01% flu "mortality rate" that the Covid-19 IFR was compared to. And it's not an actual mortality rate (MR) because FL Health reports an influenza MR of 0.5/100000 or 0.0005%, which is very low as expected from a MR.
flhealthcharts.com/ChartsReports/…
So the 0.01% flu whatever-rate isn't sourced, which means the claim that the flu is worse than Covid at young age isn't validated here! If it's also a case fatality rate, then the comparison to the COVID-19 IFR is wrong because these two type of rates aren't directly comparable.
I think this showed how difficult it is to correctly source a simple yet impactful statement like that - or how easy it is to push an agenda. I haven't even gotten into other studies as additional source. Small reference on the different rates below.
intereconomics.eu/contents/year/…
Aha.

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More from @AndreasShrugged

Andreas Backhaus Profile picture
Feb 3
🧵Ich bin zwar kein Parteimitglied, aber ich kann versuchen, die Standortbestimmung, die die CDU unter Merz gerade durchlebt, zu erklären: Die CDU ist traditionell eine "Mitte-Rechts"-Partei. In den letzten 20 Jahren hat sie sich aber zu einer "Mitte-Irgendwas"-Partei gewandelt.
D.h. füllte die CDU früher bequem die Parlamentssitze rechts der Mitte (oder des Medianwählers) aus und kam meist zusammen mit dem kleinen Koalitionspartner FDP auf eine Mehrheit, so hat sie unter Merkel viel des rechten Parlamentsflügels aufgegeben.
Ein Beleg dafür ist, dass die CDU sich praktisch nicht dagegen gewehrt hat, als von linker Seite das Attribut "rechts" praktisch als Synonym für "rechtsextrem" gesellschaftlich etabliert wurde.
Read 20 tweets
Andreas Backhaus Profile picture
Aug 29, 2024
I'll go on a little rant about this paper in @QJEHarvard if only for its treatment of the literature. As it's clearly not the first paper to analyze Black economic progress after slavery, we'll focus on the value-added over previous research. An important reference here is Sacerdote (ReStat 2005) "Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital".Image
Now Althoff and Reichardt do cite Sacerdote twice - in Sections IV.B and V.A, rather en passant alluding to what they see as conceptual shortcomings in his approach. They never cite Sacerdote in their review of the existing evidence though. Despite the Sacerdote paper having asked a very similar question, A&R never tell what his conclusions were and how they may contrast with their findings and why.Image
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Clearly, both data and empirical strategy of Sacerdote (2005) may seem outdated in the 2020s. On the other hand, the @ipums U.S. census extracts used by Sacerdote laid the groundwork for the complex census linkages of today. Sacerdote is also well-aware of the limits to identification in his approach but nevertheless realizes he can put bounds on the true effects - which I personally find pretty clever.Image
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Read 9 tweets
Andreas Backhaus Profile picture
Jan 13, 2023
Zeitgleich zum neuen Corona-Podcast 😉 auch ein neues, informatives Video von Oberst Reisner zum Ukrainekrieg. Neben den beobachteten, wechselseitigen Anpassungsdynamiken (Russland an HIMARS, Ukraine an Drohnen und CM) ist besonders lehrreich, warum...
...beide Seiten sich derzeit (wieder) in den Abnutzungskrieg verkeilen: Russland fehlt v.a. die fähige Infanterie, der Ukraine die (Schützen-)Panzer und Artillerie für größere Angriffe. Keine Seite kann also ähnlich wie im 1. WK einen schnellen K.O. erzielen. Russlann kann es
sich aber leisten, Söldner und schlecht ausgebildete Soldaten für geringe Geländegewinne zu verheizen, während die Ukraine kein Gelände kampflos aufgeben will und deshalb ebenfalls viele Soldaten einsetzen und ggf. opfern muss. Im Hintergrund bildet Russland
Read 4 tweets
Andreas Backhaus Profile picture
Dec 21, 2022
The primary purpose of the vaccines was to decrease the harm resulting from people's initial infection with SARS-CoV-2. This goal has largely been accomplished, despite intense GBD lobbying to the contrary, as large majorities have accepted the vaccines early enough. Take the L.
The cope is strong in "Look how the necessity for vaccines has changed since then!" Obviously, it has, at least beyond the most vulnerable, and so it should. Similarly, the effectiveness of vaccines obviously declines in a population that is already past its initial infection. 🤷‍♂️
Here's Fauci saying exactly that in October 2020: "The primary thing you want to do is that if people get infected, prevent them from getting sick, and if you prevent them from getting sick, you will ultimately prevent them from getting seriously ill."
finance.yahoo.com/news/fauci-vac…
Read 6 tweets
Andreas Backhaus Profile picture
Oct 4, 2022
This tweet is so wonderful because it demonstrates that nobody needs to be wealthy or smart or special in any way to come up with a better view on Ukraine than Mike or Elon. In fact, everybody who is aware that he isn't any of this is already light-years ahead of the two.
For example, everybody can count to 2. So everybody can count how many times Russia has attacked Ukraine in recent decades: 1, 2 times. And everybody can count how many times Ukraine has attacked Russia: 0 times. Everybody knows 2>0, so everybody knows the bothsidesism is BS.
Everybody who doesn't know about ethnic relations between Russia and Ukraine can google "Russia-Ukraine relations" and click on the Wikipedia page. Everybody can read that Ukrainian attitudes on Russia were splendid ten years ago and that this doesn't square with "ethnic hatred".
Read 5 tweets
Andreas Backhaus Profile picture
May 5, 2022
As I've already explained in German, there's no actual study backing up this claim. There's data being collected as part of a survey, but the researcher making this claim hasn't documented it in a publication or disclosed the data. Hey, maybe that's why it's on Disclose. Haha.
The absence of a documentation makes it impossible to compare the stated rate of complications to that from other studies. What is clear though is that participation in the survey is not random but voluntary, meaning there's potentially a huge self-selection bias problem.
As @doc_ecmo pointed out, the claimed rate of severe complications of 0.8% seems quite absurd. Germany administered ~15 million 2nd doses during June 2021, which would have resulted in 120,000 cases of severe complications flooding the hospitals soon after. But it didn't.
Read 4 tweets

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