Epidemiology gets personal
by Michael Cook | 3 May 2020 | 1 comment
John Ioannidis
The statistician behind sceptical views of national Covid-19 lockdowns, Stanford’s John Ioannidis, has become a target of abuse by colleagues who believe that his ideas are dangerous and perhaps politically motivated.
Ioannides, who was once called “one of the most influential scientists alive” has published research which says that the mortality rate may be as low as 0.2% or less – a bit higher than seasonal flu.
“The best data that we have now suggests that it’s not one out of 30 or one out of a hundred people who get infected who will die. It’s probably in the range of one in a thousand,” Ioannidis told Fox News host Mark Levin. “We also know that there’s some types of people who are at much higher risk than others. Most of the population has minimal risk, in the range of dying while you’re driving from home to work and back.”
Conservative media have used his research to question the need for government-mandated social distancing and lockdowns. But some scientists have accused him of doing “horrible science”.
“His current study fits most of the high-risk criteria for falsehood that he outlines [in how own research], such as publishing in a really hot scientific field with few corroborating studies, using a small bias sample, [and] reporting provocative findings in a politically charged arena,” epidemiologist Travis Gerke told UnDark. “If you just go through his own work, he seems to be breaking all his own rules.”
However, in an essay in Stat, two scientists who are sceptical of Ioannides’s claims insist that disagreement should not degenerate into name-calling.
Society faces a risk even more toxic and deadly than Covid-19: that the conduct of science becomes indistinguishable from politics. The tensions between the two policy poles of rapidly and systematically reopening society versus maximizing sheltering in place and social isolation must not be reduced to Republican and Democratic talking points, even as many media outlets promote such simplistic narratives.
Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge
Like rivets popping on a sinking ship, the stresses of the pandemic are revealing the weakness in our societies. Suddenly we realise how much we depend on humble workers who provide essential services, how much we depend on supply chains, how vulnerable the elderly are, and so on.
One statistic that caught my eye was the number of over-65s in care per thousand of population. This came up as part of Donald Trump's boast that the per capita death rate in the United States is far lower than the highest nation, which was Belgium. There's a reason for that -- Belgium is counting many deaths in nursing homes as deaths from coronavirus, even if the people had not been tested.
But a chart in the BBC story showed that Belgium also has the the third highest proportion of people in nursing homes in Europe, 71 per thousand. Even higher were the Netherlands (75) and Luxembourg (82). Is it a coincidence that these three countries have also legalised euthanasia? What does that figure say about their social structure? After the pandemic has passed, I hope someone follows this up.
One statistic that caught my eye was the number of over-65s in care per thousand of population. This came up as part of Donald Trump's boast that the per capita death rate in the United States is far lower than the highest nation, which was Belgium. There's a reason for that -- Belgium is counting many deaths in nursing homes as deaths from coronavirus, even if the people had not been tested.
But a chart in the BBC story showed that Belgium also has the the third highest proportion of people in nursing homes in Europe, 71 per thousand. Even higher were the Netherlands (75) and Luxembourg (82). Is it a coincidence that these three countries have also legalised euthanasia? What does that figure say about their social structure? After the pandemic has passed, I hope someone follows this up.
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