For posterity’s sake I want to be sure to get this article entered into my blog:
https://fee.org/articles/john-ioannidis-warned-covid-19-could-be-a-once-in-a-century-data-fiasco-he-was-right/
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COVID-19 has been far from the deadliest virus in modern history, but it has been the most divisive. The public, politicians, policy experts, and public health officials have disagreed on how deadly it is and how best to contain it.
But the one thing everyone seems to agree on is the numbers we have—fatalities and cases—are way wrong. A new CDC report estimates COVID-19 rates about 10 times higher than reported. Ioannidis put the figure even higher, estimating weeks ago that as many 300 million people had already been infected globally.
Deaths are more complicated.
The New York Times says COVID-19 deaths have been massively undercounted. Dr. Ashish Jha, speaking to Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, agreed, saying most experts agreed there is a “substantial undercount.”
Others, including nearly one-third of Americans according to a recent survey, believe that the COVID-19 death toll is inflated. This includes physicians who say medical professionals are being pressured by hospital administrators to add coronavirus to death sheets.
Writing at the American Mind, Angelo Codevilla recently argued if the CDC had used the same criterion for the SARS virus as COVID-19—primarily “severe acute respiratory distress syndrome”—total COVID fatalities in the US would have been 16,000 through June.
Nobody knows the true count, of course. But the one thing left and right seem to agree on is the data we have are junk. And yet the lesson we keep hearing is “trust the experts.”
“Follow the science. Listen to the experts. Do what they tell you,”
