This is something I've really been struck by when looking at the infection fatality rate of COVID-19. Despite the enormous number of serosurveys that some called essential, we've gained almost no real knowledge by pinpointing a specific IFRhttps://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1275982748759412736 …
That's largely wrong. Media sensationalism aside, the serosurveys were there to establish how widespread infections had been in the population, with some hoping that they'd show a vastly reduced mortality rate. In fact, they've mostly shown that mortality is high
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High compared to what?
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Other disease, baseline risk, whichever metric you'd really be interested in. An IFR of 0.5% implies roughly 1.2 million deaths in the US before you'd be close to herd immunity
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Don’t we also need to put context around these numbers based on age? Total IFR may be 0.2%-0.6%, higher than flu, but includes a lot of elderly medically fragile people. Exclude them as outliers (and protect them differently) and we have flu IFR, or less.
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If you exclude elderly, the IFR of flu drops drastically. Almost all influenza deaths are in <5yo and >65yo, whereas COVID-19 kills from 30+ The age-specific IFR of COVID is far higher than influenza as well
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