
Ask HN: Are you skeptical about the official corona narrative? - corona-research
Stanford professor John Ioannidis called the pandemic a “once in a century evidence fiasco” because there are multiple strange problems with the data presented to the general public:<p>- The total number of positive test results induces fear but is pointless.<p>- Number of positive tests without a relation to the testing volume is pointless.<p>- More testing, more false positives. There are few true positives so the effective false positive rate is relatively high. At this point, perhaps even more than 50% of positives are false positive.<p>- Everyone who had a positive test is counted as a “covid death”. Irregardless of the actual cause of death.<p>- Without random sampling we cannot measure the actual severity.<p>- Multiple independent studies have shown that Covid-19 is comparable to the seasonal flu. There is no extremely deadly killer virus.<p>- Lockdowns damage the economy brutally, unemployment rates and suicides increased drastically<p>- Trillions of dollars are printed to “reduce” the damage<p>- Hospitals aren’t full but rather empty.<p>What do you think? Does all that make sense to you?
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byoung2
_Hospitals aren’t full but rather empty._

My wife is an ICU nurse. Her hospital on a regular day last year had 19 ICU
beds, with half of them occupied at any given time. These are beds for
patients who require level 2 or 3 support...basically constant monitoring by a
nurse with specialized training, and support for respiratory or 2 or more
failing organ systems. Not all nurses are certified for this level of care
(CCRN certification), and there is a limit to the amount of equipment needed
for a bed on this floor (you've heard of ventilator shortages).

Fast forward to today. Her hospital expanded from 19 beds that used to be 50%
utilized to 38 beds that are 95% utilized. That leaves only 2 open beds in the
ICU. So if 10 people get hospitalized for COVID-19, and 3 of them have to go
to the ICU, 1 will have to be transferred to another hospital. The rest of the
hospital is pretty empty. The elective surgery clinic, allergy clinic, hearing
clinic, orthopedic clinic...these are all closed. The emergency department is
also open. So a hospital that normally has a few hundred beds seems empty, but
the ICU that normally has 10 patients has more than triple that. It is a
contradiction that the hospital is both empty and over capacity at the same
time.

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quantified
CDC estimates 35K US deaths from the flu last year. Most people got the flu in
some form or another.

We’re more than triple the number of deaths from Covid, and we just don’t know
who’s gotten it and who hasn’t yet.

It has a wide range of effects, most seem to not know it happened, a few are
killed quickly, and in between a bunch are debilitated for a couple of weeks.
I haven’t noticed having it, I know people who have. Extended family has died
from it.

The transmissibility and the wide range of responses confounds everyone who
can only handle simple rules about what to think and do.

I agree that many of the published stats are not that useful, and the
sledgehammer shutdowns needed to be careful fine-grained tracking and harm
control. None of the points above relate to the narrative, though, but rather
to bits and pieces of stuff. We, supposedly the richest nation on earth,
cannot get our act together to test effectively or treat effectively. Lockdown
damage, ineffective travel bans at the beginning (ban travel, but with tons of
sentimental exceptions? No ban at all, really) is self-inflicted harm.

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byoung2
_Everyone who had a positive test is counted as a “covid death”. Irregardless
of the actual cause of death._

This is not true. Or, more accurately, it is not more true about COVID-19 than
other diseases. If someone tests positive for COVID-19 and then has a car
accident, the cause of death does not add to the COVID-19 death count. As was
the case before COVID-19, the physician fills out the death certificate with
the immediate cause of death and the circumstances leading up to that
immediate cause. There are some cases where the cause of death is not entirely
clear, but this was the case long before COVID-19. Examples would include
George Floyd, who had a knee pressed on his neck, exacerbated by heart disease
and diabetes. The official cause of death was "cardiopulmonary arrest
complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression" despite
the fact that he tested positive for coronavirus.

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corona-research
The WHO recommends to label everyone as a c19 death who was tested positively
within the last month. They say they explicitly want to overestimate the
number of deaths because they don’t want to underestimate it to be on the save
side.

Additionally, the relatively high false-positive rate leads to an even higher
overestimate.

Also aren’t there massive financial incentives for clinics to label someone as
a c19 death? IIRC an ICU bed for a c19 patient costs 5-10x more per day than
for other patients.

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necovek
Citation missing (for claims regarding numbers and "independent studies").

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corona-research
I was referring to Ioannidis’ meta study analyzing 24 studies on c19’s IFR

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v3)

~~~
byoung2
From your link:

 _This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [1]. It reports
new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to
guide clinical practice._

[1]Readers should therefore be aware that articles on medRxiv have not been
finalized by authors, might contain errors, and report information that has
not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical
community.

~~~
corona-research
Ioannidis is one of the most cited researchers ever. In particular he’s famous
for debunking bogus science with accurate statistics. He’s absolutely among
the top epidemiologists in the world.

Bro, it’s ridiculous to try to downplay his analysis without even trying to
understand it. XD

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tobyhede
Is it more likely to be a vast global conspiracy involving such unlikely co-
conspirators as the prime minister of new zealand and the POTUS ... or a
chaotic and rapidly evolving situation?

~~~
corona-research
Maybe it’s just an echo chamber of misaligned incentives?

