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My understanding is that it’s the other way around — both cases and deaths are being undercounted substantially. And testing capacity has been intentionally kneecapped by the govt (if you test fewer, you’ll find fewer cases, which looks good).

All told, COVID looks to be about 10x deadlier than the flu. Which is still low, but not trivial given how quickly it spreads.

I don't think your understanding is up to date.

10x deadlier than the flu would require it to have an IFR of 1%. Even the US CDC, which has been over-exaggerating the dangers from the start, peg it at much less than that, more like 0.3% and many studies are putting it even lower, like between 0.08% (low end, Denmark) and 0.36% (Germany, Heisenberg).

But those IFRs are also calculated using the standard definition of a COVID death - someone who died, and was testing positive.

If you look at Italy, early on they realised there was a conflation going on, and so they did proper studies of some sample of COVID deaths to see why they really died. They concluded only 4% of the patients had no other medical conditions, and I recall reading (but don't have a link right now) that they concluded about 12% had really died of COVID. The rest all just happened to be infected when they died of something else, which would make sense given the first stat. So you can cut a digit off most of the reported death rates.

All suggestions of undercounting are based on the assumption that all excess death is caused by COVID, and nothing else, even though in some countries e.g. the UK many excess death certificates don't even mention COVID, and in other countries like Germany there basically isn't any excess death:

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Socie...

If you look at the CDC data on Excess Deaths[1] then you can see that COVID and the response to COVID has been responsible for a significant number of excess deaths in every week since the week ending on 3/28.

So, maybe not 10x deadlier, but certainly way deadlier in total count of deaths.

1 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

COVID and the response to it - maybe yes. But remember that many countries have seen no excess death at all, their graphs are totally flat. Just look at EuroMOMO.

People have tried to figure out why. It's supposedly the same virus everywhere. It's not related to hospital overload or healthcare availability because nowhere ran out of that, despite the initial scares.

It might be care home related, as that's where 80% of the deaths are (reported to be). It might be related to decisions to flush hospitals to make way for a modelled surge that never happened. But then that'd fall squarely into the response bucket.

The US data is hard to interpret because it only goes back to 2017. I can't seem to find longer term data. Do you know where to find it?

In the UK - one of the 'worst hit' in the world supposedly (but those stats were found to be wrong) - to find similar excess deaths you have to go back to 1998/1999/2000. Is this bad? Well, "once in 20 year excess death spike" may seem bad. But events that happen once every 20 years aren't especially rare. Back then nobody panicked. Nobody talks about the terrible winters of 1999 when they lost so many loved ones. So it's really important to be able to put these excess death stats in perspective, otherwise you just see a bump in a graph and are told "this is really bad".

> If you look at Italy, early on they realised there was a conflation going on, and so they did proper studies of some sample of COVID deaths to see why they really died. They concluded only 4% of the patients had no other medical conditions, and I recall reading (but don't have a link right now) that they concluded about 12% had really died of COVID. The rest all just happened to be infected when they died of something else, which would make sense given the first stat. So you can cut a digit off most of the reported death rates.

If you look at Italy, the recent ISTAT-ISS report (2020-07-16) showed the opposite: COVID-19 has been deemed directly responsible for the death of 89% of those who died testing positive for coronavirus ("morti per"), with the remaining 11% of deaths being caused by some other disease or pre-existing condition ("morti con").

Even excluding comorbidities such as diabetes and hypertension, which are very common, 18% to 28% of the deaths they analyzed were still directly caused by COVID. I'm not sure this can be brought down to 12% without being exceedingly selective (e.g., people aged 0-30 without hypertension, diabetes, respiratory problems... - I know I'm 27 and I wouldn't qualify).

> - Sono state analizzate le informazioni riportate dai medici in 4.942 schede di morte, di soggetti diagnosticati microbiologicamente con test positivo al SARS-CoV-2 (il 15,6% del totale dei decessi notificati al Sistema di Sorveglianza Integrata ISS fino al 25 maggio). Nelle schede di morte sono certificate, oltre a COVID-19, quelle condizioni e malattie che hanno avuto un ruolo nel determinare il decesso.

> - COVID-19 è la causa direttamente responsabile della morte nell’89% dei decessi di persone positive al test SARS-CoV-2, mentre per il restante 11% le cause di decesso sono le malattie cardiovascolari (4,6%), i tumori (2,4%), le malattie del sistema respiratorio (1%), il diabete (0,6%), le demenze e le malattie dell’apparato digerente (rispettivamente 0,6% e 0,5%).

> - La quota di deceduti in cui COVID-19 è la causa direttamente responsabile della morte varia in base all’età, raggiungendo il valore massimo del 92% nella classe 60-69 anni e il minimo (82%) nelle persone di età inferiore ai 50 anni.

> - COVID-19 è una malattia che può rivelarsi fatale anche in assenza di concause. Non ci sono infatti concause di morte preesistenti a COVID-19 nel 28,2% dei decessi analizzati, percentuale simile nei due sessi e nelle diverse classi di età. Solo nella classe di età 0-49 anni la percentuale di decessi senza concause è più bassa, pari al 18%.

Televideo source: http://www.televideo.rai.it/televideo/pub/view.jsp?id=888&p=...

ANSA source: https://www.ansa.it/canale_saluteebenessere/notizie/sanita/2...

The ISS-ISTAT report itself: https://www.istat.it/it/files/2020/07/Report_ISS_Istat_Cause...

> you have half of all restaurants on Yelp permanently closing

You misunderstood the data. Half of all restaurants that temporarily closed went on to permanently close. >98% of restaurants stayed open, less than 1% permanently closed.

Yeah, so benign that hospitals are being overrun... oh, but that must be made up. Come on and open your eyes.

It is common for individual hospitals to occasionally need to load balance to other nearby hospitals. That is nothing unusual.

Overload in an entire region would be, but as far as I know that has never happened anywhere.

However, you can be forgiven for thinking that. Bad news sells newspapers, which seems to have led to a lot of very deceptive reporting. For example, headlines that literally say:

"All the hospitals are full: in Houston overwhelmed hospitals leave COVID-19 patients waiting in ER"

but at the time of publishing there were 2500 free beds in the Texas Medical Center system in Houston. So it wasn't possible that all the hospitals were full.

Are the refrigerated trucks being loaded with bodies that won't fit in the morgue just for show as well?

No, but that's inevitable if funeral workers refuse to handle body's due to lack of ppe, which was the underlying cause for the temporary morgues in most places (not sure about New York)

> The virus is indeed pretty benign compared to many other disasters

I agree with you here - it's not like it kills a third of people who get infected. Also, the virus is not very contagious - all it really takes is wearing masks and distancing for the spread to diminish.

But most everyone has rationally judged that a 1% chance of death is too high, never mind the larger chance of life long complications. So anyone who can reduce their own exposure finds it prudent to do so.

Meanwhile, and this ties into "something else at work", we've got corrupt leaders and corrupt mass media that have done little to address the public health crisis, and everything possible to inflame and politicize the issue.

And so our society is still stuck at essentially the same position we began at in March. Either we're going to have to buckle down and actually work together to control this thing, or we're going to be stuck with this virus (and therefore a broken economy) until a vaccine is created.

The chance of death is not 1%. Here are a couple of reviews:

https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...

Across 32 different locations, the median infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.24%). Most studies were done in pandemic epicenters with high death tolls.

But recall that these IFRs are calculated with a very questionable definition of COVID death (see my other comment). Real IFRs are much lower when you take into account that many people who have "died of COVID" have in reality died of something else, even perhaps the supposedly no longer existent condition of old age.

This is how you can have countries that have hundreds of thousands of cases yet totally flat excess death charts.

I suspect these kind of inflated figures are partly what's driving people's over-reactions (look at how my post was voted).

And there's some evidence for this. Today there was a poll released with truly shocking results.

page 12 here: https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-...

In polls Brits are estimating that 7% of the population has died of COVID. In other words they think it's 100x more deadly than current government stats claim, and those stats are themselves currently suspended due to rampant over-counting.

But Americans are even further out. They believe the death rate is 225x higher than it really is. They also believe the virus is 20x more prevalent than in reality.

Top marks go to Germans who believe 300x more people have died of COVID than is really true.

I wouldn’t know how to test for it (maybe by checking for a bimodal distribution in answers, with a fairly narrow ‘hump’ near the correct number?), but I think that more shows many people are awfully bad at this kind of math, in particular probabilities.

Even accepting your figure of a 1 in 400 chance, it is still foolish to needlessly take on that risk. You can't complain about the innumeracy of the population when they overestimate, while taking advantage of 0.24% seeming like some infinitesimally small number for the same reason.

Ultimately you're getting downvoted because you're pushing politically-filtered numbers with copious hand waving. That whitepaper seems tailor made for business owners pushing their employees back into the office. These downplaying narratives are responsible for our current approach of doing nothing but watching the economy crumble, and it's not surprising that most people have grown tired of them.

Most developed countries have gotten this under control. The US has chosen not to. Until the virus is contained, the economy we knew is dead in the water. This is only hard to understand if you deny that there is any problem whatsoever, as most of our "leadership" has been doing from day one.

What risk, exactly? The risk of going outside, going on holiday, spending time with other people?

If the risk is the same or lower than flu, which these studies say it is, then we should act as we do in flu years, which is every year, i.e. we shouldn't be changing anything.

you're pushing politically-filtered numbers with copious hand waving

No, I'm providing hard data in the face of people who have been misled into thinking the virus is more dangerous than it really is. That isn't "copious hand waving". Perhaps though, you wish it was? The virus became long ago a deeply ideological matter for the left, some of whom seem to almost hope it's very deadly. But my points here aren't ideological, they're factual.

Most developed countries have gotten this under control. The US has chosen not to.

I'm not American but this strange "we Americans uniquely suck" narrative just seems silly.

In the past few days the UK decided everyone returning from Spain must go into 14 day quarantine where they aren't allowed out of their house for any reason, not even to buy food, and this must be done even if they are healthy. It was done without any warning and there will be no wage compensation for those who can't work because they're quarantined. Then almost immediately after they decided that actually 14 days wasn't necessary after all (science!!), and dropped it to "only" 10 days.

The justification for this was a supposed "surge" in Spanish cases. Absolute numbers are of course still tiny, but a quick check of the data shows that the surge started at exactly the same time that test volumes started ramping up, and the proportion of tests coming back positive has hardly changed.

There are similar stories of self-inflicted wounds from nearly every country except, it seems, Sweden and bizarrely, Belarus.

And that was my original point. COVID-19 is an entirely artificial disaster, made by the absurd and illogical reactions of people. It's not a natural biological disaster. The bad effects are all coming from the decisions people are making.

> I'm providing hard data

Your "hard data" has been drawn from the pool of all studies using a political filter, meaning it has sampling bias and is no longer hard data. I am guessing that is the lowest IFR number you can find, therefore its reasonable to assume that the true one is decently higher.

Here is an example of your hand waving:

> Real IFRs are much lower when you take into account that many people who have "died of COVID" have in reality died of something else, even perhaps the supposedly no longer existent condition of old age.

If one is not thinking critically, this can sound reasonable. But rather this is a huge back door because nobody dies "of COVID" - it's always going to be some other medical condition caused by COVID. In the short time frame involved, there aren't going to be too many people who test positive for COVID then die of unrelated causes. On the longer term, we can simply look at excess deaths.

> I'm not American but this strange "we Americans uniquely suck" narrative just seems silly.

For one, the fact that Americans haven't been able to do basic things like wear N95 masks starting in February. For two, the death toll. The differences between countries are easily explained with culture. Japan had no formal shutdown but yet stayed in control because Japanese citizens did the right thing anyway. Many Americans seem hell bent on doing the exact opposite, in some simulation of rebelling.

In general, it seems like you're skating as close as possible to calling the topic a hoax, without directly doing so.

Your first paragraph would appear to invalidate any argument about anything that cites data, as anyone can be told they are using a "political filter", that's an unfalsifiable claim. So I'll ignore it. If you have better data, show it! (And some replies from others are doing that)

I don't think I understand your second paragraph. Of course some people die of COVID, or just isn't equal to the number reported for COVID deaths, which is "died with" and not "died of". That's not hand waving, it's well understood fact.

In the short term there are definitely lots of people who test positive then die of something else, as virtually all covid deaths are of the old where it's often very hard to say what exactly they died of, and there can be many causes. Excess deaths are certainly not all COVID and there was an article today in the British press urging governments to focus on the new problem of large amounts of excess deaths in the home that aren't linked to covid in any way, but rather seem to be people who are struggling to get medical treatment for other things.

N95 masks couldn't possibly have been used by all Americans in February for the same reason they can't be used now, the manufacturing capacity isn't there. That's why around the world people are using cloth masks which aren't proven to stop much of anything.

As for Japanese people doing the right thing anyway, well, I don't want to get into national stereotyping.

> Your first paragraph would appear to invalidate any argument about anything that cites data, as anyone can be told they are using a "political filter"

Unfortunately that is what happens when science gets dragged into politics. One team finds a list of studies showing things one way, the other team makes a list of refutations, and they're passed around as talking points. I'd rather just say I don't know without in-depth literature research, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and not attempt to draw strong emotionally-appealing conclusions such as "same or lower than flu".

> I don't think I understand your second paragraph. Of course some people die of COVID

Nobody dies of COVID, just like nobody dies of cancer. There is always some immediate acute condition that causes the death. And so saying that someone who tested positive then died of unrelated old person stuff is just another way of massaging numbers. While this scenario can happen, I don't think it's prevalent.

> N95 masks couldn't possibly have been used by all Americans in February for the same reason they can't be used now

I deliberately set the bar high, because if we had aimed there, we would have the manufacturing capacity by now. Saying we're unprepared now because we didn't do the work before isn't very interesting. Rather, take it as a call to start doing the work now so we're prepared in the future.

> That's why around the world people are using cloth masks which aren't proven to stop much of anything.

Ah, more offhanded FUD to justify inaction. We get it, you don't want to have to do anything. As I said, "skating as close as possible to calling the topic a hoax".

Well, nobody dies of COVID or cancer is a much stronger claim than I'm making, which is ultimately statistical.

I think some people do die of COVID, same as they can die of flu. It's just very rare and not equal to the reported death rate.

Re: science and politics. I've linked you to a couple of meta-reviews, done by people who searched the literature. You appear to be working backwards from a desired conclusion: that is, you deem "same or lower than flu" as emotionally appealing and therefore inherently likely to be wrong. But how is that logical? The correctness of an argument isn't based on whether the outcomes are emotionally satisfying or not.

At any rate, I do hope you go and perform your own literature review or research, to find out what's really happening. Because right now you seem to be one of the people covered by the poll, who were significantly over-estimating the true dangers.

Re: N95 masks. You're still making incorrect claims. N95 masks are built from a form of meltblown fiber. The machines that can create this kind of material are very niche and hard to construct. Each one has a fixed production capacity and the sort of manufacturers that make them work on them one at a time, with most stuff done by hand. Demand isn't high enough for them to be mass produced. That places hard limits on how fast material manufacture can be scaled up. People did look at this in February and realised there was no physical way to scale up N95 mask production on any kind of short timescale. The machinery just isn't there.

Rather, take it as a call to start doing the work now so we're prepared in the future.

There is a sad story related to this. The US only really has one mask company. He didn't ramp up production even during the midst of COVID times because in the past he's learned the hard way that governments panic over mild diseases, order lots of masks, so they scale up and hire new workers - then by the time the mask production is scaled up the panic is over and governments stop buying, leaving them nearly bankrupt. So he just didn't do it again.

Fundamentally, governments are too incompetent and panic prone to manage disease. It's been proven over and over. They even burn people who can make medical equipment, such that they don't want to help again.

At any rate, N95 masks are inappropriate for the general population. You can get things like this:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/driver-crash-passed-wearing-n95-ma...

Ah, more offhanded FUD to justify inaction

It's not FUD. Cloth masks can't stop viruses, they're far too small. They only stop liquid droplets, but they also saturate within hours and need to be thrown away. Most people aren't doing that, it's been studied. Again, go do your own research.

You keep citing the difficulties of imperfect first steps as reasons to avoid trying anything at all. Of course it looks like nothing can be done!

I can only hope you come to your senses, regardless of whether the biological risk is exaggerated or not.

First steps are very hard, yes.

I'm distinguishing in a way I think you aren't - to me, exactly because this stuff is so hard, and so many things have bad side effects, it shouldn't be done by governments. That doesn't mean nothing should be done by anyone. When things are done by non-governmental actors, the rest of us have the option of ignoring them if we think they're wrong (usually). When a government does something wrong, everyone is stuffed. And exactly because there's no feedback loop for the vast majority of government employees, except politicians, and even then only weakly, they tend to do things wrong a lot.

One day I think you'll come to understand this perspective. But first you need to realise that doing nothing is not only an option but often, the best option. The assumption that "something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done" is a political cliché for a reason.

> It's not driven by the actual facts of the virus, there's something else at work.

What do you think that might be?

See my comment below, about page 12 of this poll:

https://www.kekstcnc.com/media/2793/kekstcnc_research_covid-...

I only just learned about it but if this poll is accurate, it explains a lot.