Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%.
I don’t find a source for this. The adjustments I saw looked different. If he’s right about those 0.125%, that would be an important update!
But it feels more plausible to me that the 0.125% thing went wrong somewhere because it just seems ruled out by South Korea, which unlike European countries has their outbreak contained. I can’t see how South Korea could somehow have missed 700% of their reported cases even though they are conducting 10,000 tests daily, and have fewer than 10,000 confirmed cases.
UPDATE: I took a shot at doing the age adjustment myself here. The summary: I don’t see how one can get anything below 0.3% and, adjusting for selection effects where the least healthy people probably avoid going on cruises, even going below 0.5% seems implausible to me. UPDATE2: I adjusted my estimates after finding more precise data. I still think 0.125% is too low, but I think something like 0.2% is perhaps already defensible. This suggests that the estimate was closer than I thought and I now consider the Diamond Princess not to be evidence in favor of IFR of 0.5% or higher (assuming no hospital overstrain).
Ioannidis makes this claim:
I don’t find a source for this. The adjustments I saw looked different. If he’s right about those 0.125%, that would be an important update!
But it feels more plausible to me that the 0.125% thing went wrong somewhere because it just seems ruled out by South Korea, which unlike European countries has their outbreak contained. I can’t see how South Korea could somehow have missed 700% of their reported cases even though they are conducting 10,000 tests daily, and have fewer than 10,000 confirmed cases.
UPDATE: I took a shot at doing the age adjustment myself here. The summary: I don’t see how one can get anything below 0.3% and, adjusting for selection effects where the least healthy people probably avoid going on cruises, even going below 0.5% seems implausible to me. UPDATE2: I adjusted my estimates after finding more precise data. I still think 0.125% is too low, but I think something like 0.2% is perhaps already defensible. This suggests that the estimate was closer than I thought and I now consider the Diamond Princess not to be evidence in favor of IFR of 0.5% or higher (assuming no hospital overstrain).