Disagree strongly. An IFR of 0.6% when considered across the entire population is indeed cause for much more alarm than one of 0.02%. It is very relevant.
0.6% of the population in the USA, for instance, would mean about 2 million people would be killed by uncontrolled and massive COVID-19 spread.
Focusing down to small subgroups would only be relevant if you have a magic wand and could, for instance, seal off all over-60 year olds from human society for a year.
P.S. the paper you cited is by John Ioannidis. He has become notorious in 2020 attempting to prove Covid-19 isn’t very dangerous. Worth consideration as this version has managed to pass peer review, but keep in mind it’s outside the mainstream of opinion. IMO, the 0.2% estimate is pretty clearly low and I’ve read a good debunking of that specific paper in the past. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1316511734115385344.html
I'll put it bluntly: fixating on an average ("average IFR") of a wildly heavy-tailed distribution (e.g. exponential for IFR-vs-age) is idiotic.
Technically yes, such average exists – the population is finite. But taking a population-wide decision based on such estimate is suboptimal. We already know a population parameter (age, comorbidities) that gets us an actionable segregation!
I personally see such "hiding behind an average of an exponential" as scientific fraud. Misinformed at best; disingenuous and murderous at worst (such as with Covid).
> He has become notorious in 2020
Interesting, thanks. I wasn't aware of John Ioannidis' pedigree. For those curious – this article does a good job summarizing the controversy (April 2020):
> Focusing down to small subgroups would only be relevant if you have a magic wand and could, for instance, seal off all over-60 year olds from human society for a year.
A magic wand to seal off over-60 olds? How do you feel about sealing off everyone?
> A magic wand to seal off over-60 olds? How do you feel about sealing off everyone?
Worked great in New Zealand and Taiwan, and pretty dang good in Singapore, Australia, and even China. A pity we weren’t fast enough to do it here.
I haven’t seen any society successfully execute a strategy to exclude the aged from human society or viral transmission yet, and we’ve had 9 months to experiment. If such a strategy existed and was proven to work, your theory that it was idiotic to ignore it would make sense. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to exist.
0.6% of the population in the USA, for instance, would mean about 2 million people would be killed by uncontrolled and massive COVID-19 spread.
Focusing down to small subgroups would only be relevant if you have a magic wand and could, for instance, seal off all over-60 year olds from human society for a year.
P.S. the paper you cited is by John Ioannidis. He has become notorious in 2020 attempting to prove Covid-19 isn’t very dangerous. Worth consideration as this version has managed to pass peer review, but keep in mind it’s outside the mainstream of opinion. IMO, the 0.2% estimate is pretty clearly low and I’ve read a good debunking of that specific paper in the past. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1316511734115385344.html