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Why it’s too tempting to believe the Oxford study on coronavirus


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2020 Mar 31, 3:00pm   666 views  6 comments

by RWSGFY   ➕follow (4)   💰tip   ignore  

Wishful thinking is a powerful thing. When I read about a new disease-modelling study from the University of Oxford, I desperately wanted to believe. It is the most prominent exploration of the “tip-of-the-iceberg hypothesis”, which suggests that the majority of coronavirus infections are so mild as to have passed unrecorded by the authorities and perhaps even un­noticed by the people infected.

If true, many of us — perhaps most of us in Europe — have already had the virus and probably developed some degree of immunity. If true, the lockdowns have served a valuable purpose in easing an overwhelming strain on intensive care units, but they will soon become unnecessary. If true.

But is it true? If it is, it stands in stark contrast to the far grimmer modelling from a group at Imperial College London, which concluded that if the epidemic was not aggressively contained, half a million people would die in the UK — and more than 2m in the US. Models such as this one helped to persuade the British government to follow much of continental Europe in putting the economy into a coma.

The differing perspectives are made possible by the fact that the data we have so far are not very good. Testing has been sporadic — in some places, shambolic — and everyone agrees that large numbers of cases never reach official notice. We do have solid statistics about deaths, and as the epidemiologist Adam Kucharski, author of The Rules of Contagion, observes, a wide variety of scenarios are consistent with the deaths we’ve seen so far. Perhaps Covid-19 is uncommon and deadly; perhaps it is ubiquitous and kills only a tiny proportion of those it affects. Deaths alone cannot tell us.



https://www.ft.com/content/14df8908-6f47-11ea-9bca-bf503995cd6f

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2   Ceffer   2020 Mar 31, 3:28pm  

Not to mention misattribution. Anybody who has died with any kind of positive Coronavirus test (not necessarily even Covid-19 definitively) as either a false positive or real, has been counted as a Covid-19 death. Any other causes or systemic conditions are dismissed as cause of death. Covid-19 is the automatic winner.

Horrible quality of data and lack of reliable testing, combined with hysterical fake news, are the premises on which this stuff is based.
3   marcus   2020 Mar 31, 7:08pm  

:
Ceffer says
Anybody who has died with any kind of positive Coronavirus test (not necessarily even Covid-19 definitively) as either a false positive or real, has been counted as a Covid-19 death.


Source ?

Yeah those false positives are probably really messing up the data.
4   Misc   2020 Apr 1, 4:21pm  

marcus says
:
Ceffer says
Anybody who has died with any kind of positive Coronavirus test (not necessarily even Covid-19 definitively) as either a false positive or real, has been counted as a Covid-19 death.


Source ?

Yeah those false positives are probably really messing up the data.


Germany supposedly only reports those attributable to Corona only. Hence, it has a much lower death rate than the rest of the world.
5   Onvacation   2020 Apr 1, 4:53pm  

HEYYOU says
Something to believe: RepCons will continue to die.

Were all gonna die.It's about quality of life and individual responsibility.

This shutdown is not about protecting the people but about changing the narrative. After Russian collusion, the Ukrainian whistleblower, and impeachment for abuse of power, this is just the latest play from the intelligence-politico-media-militairy-industrial complex that has been running this country since they killed Kennedy.

What we're not seeing is Trump rallies, Burisma and Epstein investigations, and Joe doing town halls.
6   Patrick   2020 Apr 1, 5:28pm  

Epstein still didn't kill himself.

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