Ask HN: Are you skeptical about the official corona narrative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you skeptical about the official corona narrative?

7 pointscorona-research11 comments

Stanford professor John Ioannidis called the pandemic a “once in a century evidence fiasco” because there are multiple strange problems with the data presented to the general public:

- The total number of positive test results induces fear but is pointless.

- Number of positive tests without a relation to the testing volume is pointless.

- More testing, more false positives. There are few true positives so the effective false positive rate is relatively high. At this point, perhaps even more than 50% of positives are false positive.

- Everyone who had a positive test is counted as a “covid death”. Irregardless of the actual cause of death.

- Without random sampling we cannot measure the actual severity.

- Multiple independent studies have shown that Covid-19 is comparable to the seasonal flu. There is no extremely deadly killer virus.

- Lockdowns damage the economy brutally, unemployment rates and suicides increased drastically

- Trillions of dollars are printed to “reduce” the damage

- Hospitals aren’t full but rather empty.

What do you think? Does all that make sense to you?

Hospitals aren’t full but rather empty.

My wife is an ICU nurse. Her hospital on a regular day last year had 19 ICU beds, with half of them occupied at any given time. These are beds for patients who require level 2 or 3 support...basically constant monitoring by a nurse with specialized training, and support for respiratory or 2 or more failing organ systems. Not all nurses are certified for this level of care (CCRN certification), and there is a limit to the amount of equipment needed for a bed on this floor (you've heard of ventilator shortages).

Fast forward to today. Her hospital expanded from 19 beds that used to be 50% utilized to 38 beds that are 95% utilized. That leaves only 2 open beds in the ICU. So if 10 people get hospitalized for COVID-19, and 3 of them have to go to the ICU, 1 will have to be transferred to another hospital. The rest of the hospital is pretty empty. The elective surgery clinic, allergy clinic, hearing clinic, orthopedic clinic...these are all closed. The emergency department is also open. So a hospital that normally has a few hundred beds seems empty, but the ICU that normally has 10 patients has more than triple that. It is a contradiction that the hospital is both empty and over capacity at the same time.

CDC estimates 35K US deaths from the flu last year. Most people got the flu in some form or another.

We’re more than triple the number of deaths from Covid, and we just don’t know who’s gotten it and who hasn’t yet.

It has a wide range of effects, most seem to not know it happened, a few are killed quickly, and in between a bunch are debilitated for a couple of weeks. I haven’t noticed having it, I know people who have. Extended family has died from it.

The transmissibility and the wide range of responses confounds everyone who can only handle simple rules about what to think and do.

I agree that many of the published stats are not that useful, and the sledgehammer shutdowns needed to be careful fine-grained tracking and harm control. None of the points above relate to the narrative, though, but rather to bits and pieces of stuff. We, supposedly the richest nation on earth, cannot get our act together to test effectively or treat effectively. Lockdown damage, ineffective travel bans at the beginning (ban travel, but with tons of sentimental exceptions? No ban at all, really) is self-inflicted harm.

Everyone who had a positive test is counted as a “covid death”. Irregardless of the actual cause of death.

This is not true. Or, more accurately, it is not more true about COVID-19 than other diseases. If someone tests positive for COVID-19 and then has a car accident, the cause of death does not add to the COVID-19 death count. As was the case before COVID-19, the physician fills out the death certificate with the immediate cause of death and the circumstances leading up to that immediate cause. There are some cases where the cause of death is not entirely clear, but this was the case long before COVID-19. Examples would include George Floyd, who had a knee pressed on his neck, exacerbated by heart disease and diabetes. The official cause of death was "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression" despite the fact that he tested positive for coronavirus.

The WHO recommends to label everyone as a c19 death who was tested positively within the last month. They say they explicitly want to overestimate the number of deaths because they don’t want to underestimate it to be on the save side.

Additionally, the relatively high false-positive rate leads to an even higher overestimate.

Also aren’t there massive financial incentives for clinics to label someone as a c19 death? IIRC an ICU bed for a c19 patient costs 5-10x more per day than for other patients.

Citation missing (for claims regarding numbers and "independent studies").

I was referring to Ioannidis’ meta study analyzing 24 studies on c19’s IFR

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

From your link:

This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [1]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.

[1]Readers should therefore be aware that articles on medRxiv have not been finalized by authors, might contain errors, and report information that has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community.

Ioannidis is one of the most cited researchers ever. In particular he’s famous for debunking bogus science with accurate statistics. He’s absolutely among the top epidemiologists in the world.

Bro, it’s ridiculous to try to downplay his analysis without even trying to understand it. XD

I see a number of problems with the methodology (eg. excluding data points after an arbitrary one-week-after-study-midpoint which author acknowledges as arbitrary, doing an averaging/smoothing of results per location first, then doing a global calculation, which compounds the error).

But the numbers do seem reasonable. Still, the difference with flu is that there is no protective vaccine to give to people at higher risk, nor do we know exactly what constitutes the higher risk, nor do we understand exactly how transmissions happen or why they do not happen.

Also note that we are already in a largely manipulated situation to be able to judge any "organic" data (we've been social distancing, hugely reduced international travel, and a stronger dedication to doing business online). While some will point at the number of people still behaving normally, I always point at the number of people who are not, reminding that this is a "game of statistics".

Finally, to me personally, global IFR and R0 numbers do not matter. I do not care how many people are affected, but how much risk does the infection pose to my close family and friends and me? It seems there is a strong correlation between heart-related diseases and coronavirus deaths, so I would like to see numbers for "extra coronavirus deaths over heart-related deaths" for an "unmanaged" first month in the US (eg. April had ~60k people, May-July another 90k). My parents, both with heart problems, barely made it through flu season a number of years back (they've been on flu vaccines since). Heart-related deaths in US average out at 600k/year or 50k/month (did not find per month averages to account for seasonal spikes). To be honest, I expect to see a huge decrease in heart-related deaths in these months, but I couldn't find anyone doing a study along those lines (or well, simply having access to current numbers)! Still, none of that helps me until there is (safe! still a year away likely) medicine to prevent or treat COVID19.

Is it more likely to be a vast global conspiracy involving such unlikely co-conspirators as the prime minister of new zealand and the POTUS ... or a chaotic and rapidly evolving situation?

Maybe it’s just an echo chamber of misaligned incentives?

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