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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Every single paper on IFR estimation seems to mostly ignore that poorer countries without infrastructure aren't capable of and are not capturing a large fraction of the covid-19 caused deaths.

They all show a clear trend of lower IFR in places like Kenya, Peru, etc and significantly higher IFR in places like Switzerland, England, France, Germany, etc. It's not hard to figure out which is closer to reality.

The only odd-man out is China, and that's obviously because China kicked out all journalists and started faking numbers back in March and have continued to report falsehoods since.

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> They all show a clear trend of lower IFR in places like Kenya, Peru, etc and significantly higher IFR in places like Switzerland, England, France, Germany, etc. It's not hard to figure out which is closer to reality.

Of course it's hard to figure out! The life expectancy in Kenya is 65 and 83 in Switzerland. It could be that there aren't many octogenarians in Kenya to kill.

I’m not sure that they ignore anything. Most poorer countries have a younger population, and we know that mortality goes up exponentially with age. This is why the IFR is 1/10,000 for someone in their 30s and 1/10 for someone in their 80s

Yes that's a factor. On average poorer countries also tend to have lower rates of the co-morbid conditions which increase COVID-19 risk such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and vitamin D deficiency.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-china-back-to-no...

I thought it was because of the aggressive response in the beginning that China is back to normal?

You are correct. OP is spreading conspiracy theories.

People are having a hard time swallowing it. There is still a lot of Western hubris in the world, and I say that as a westerner.

Given how quickly the virus spreads, given that China stopped all of its lockdowns in May, and given the nature of exponential growth, if China were lying about its numbers, by this point, they would have tens or hundreds of millions of cases.

If that were the case, your Chinese coworker with family back home would have known about their entire extended family getting sick.

... Yet, their extended family is not sick, and life in China goes on as normal.

What is the most plausible explanation for this?

PS. China's self-reported IFR was ~6%. If they are making up all the numbers, do you think they might have fabricated a lower number?

You’re downvoted for the obvious truth, which is that China’s numbers are almost certainly real.

People who still don’t get it can’t accept that China has beat us here. If you’ve been there in the last 5 years, I think it is entirely unsurprising that they did.

For Peru at least we have some data that shows their excess mortality is far greater than their official numbers:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...

Data as of Apr 1-Oct 31

Covid 19 Deaths: 34,446 Excess Deaths: 82,076

It might not entirely be incorrect either. Very few deaths are officially reported but the deaths which weren't going to be reported, were of the same subset of people who never tested either, despite symptoms.

So it would be safe to assume while both the infected and fatality numbers are way off, they are at least representative. Hence, I believe the IFR isn't incorrect.

fatality numbers in general is captured quite well by many countries.

The infection numbers are admittedly unreliable.

This means that we still get a very valuable signal of deaths per million population and deaths per million in hospitals (weaker for the 2nd one).

Testing coverage has the biggest variance accross countries.

IFR = "Infection Fatality Ratio" (for those who were unfamiliar with the acronym like me).

I could guess form the text but was about to look it up so thanks for disambiguating the term here. Wish people would add in parens the meaning of the acronym they use at the first occurence in the text then refer to the acronym only.

> Wish people would add in parens the meaning of the acronym they use at the first occurence

I find that style utterly patronizing. For uncommon abbreviations it would be better to introduce them in parenthesis after their meaning is spelled out on first use. The reader gains by looking-up common abbreviations.

nature publishes research papers. Those tend to address primarily fellow researchers familiar with the terms.

HN is a generalist forum. People who use specialized acronyms in threads here inconvenience the generalist HN user base. Just as we would expect researchers writing for specialist journals to write for their specialist audience, we should expect HN posters to write for the generalist HN audience.

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