Friday, March 27, 2020

Clarice Feldman - The Great Iggy weighs in: Seems to me there's a...

Clarice Feldman - The Great Iggy weighs in: Seems to me there's a...
"The Great Iggy weighs in: Seems to me there's a lot of confirmation bias going on for just about everybody.
First, that Imperial College Ferguson guy didn't "correct" his earlier claims
His original numbers [which I didn't even see until today] were his estimate of what would happen in the UK and US if nothing was done. 
I believe he had a range but the only numbers quoted by the press of course were his maximums of 2.2 million deaths in the US and half a mill in the UK.
His new numbers [ie 20,000 or likely many fewer than that in the UK] are not due to him looking back and saying 'OMG, I got everything wrong' the first time. 
Those are the numbers based on the steps that have been taken in the UK to prevent the spread of it. He did say the R0 number may be closer to 3 than 2.5 but that doesn't change his estimate from 500,000 dead to 20,000. 
And we've known since January in China that it mostly kills old people with comorbidities, so his pointing out probably half the victims would have died in the next year anyway was not some new admission or data point either.
And the Oxford study which supposedly contradicts his is based on an iffy assumption or two as detailed in this Reason article exploring its conclusions; Half of United Kingdom Already Infected With Coronavirus, Says Oxford Model.
This article notes a similar issue; Iceland is Doing Science — ~50% of People with COVID-19 Not Showing Symptoms, ~50% Have Very Moderate Cold Symptoms [UPDATED]
The update is that if, as reported, there is an 80% false positive rate on a bunch of these tests then there in fact are not scores of millions of asymptomatic carriers walking around.
The guys contradicting the other guys seem to rely on even iffier assumptions than the dudes they're "correcting".
Everybody, except our congressional and nevertrump psychos, would like this to be much less harmful than it seemed at first look. 
Hopefully not so much so that we believe things that have not much basis in fact."

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