Daniel in SD
(supervised)
I completely disagree. They are making zero effort. I'm just as upset over their analysis of the Iceland data. There is plenty of information about incubation periods, time from infection to death, demographics, and they are using none of it. It is not a serious analysis. This is what a serious analysis looks like:The Icelandic IFR was also below the low end of their error bars for their earlier IFR estimates. For some reason no one seems upset that their earlier IFR estimate was too high or accuses them of being "intentional deceitful" or "idiots" for potentially estimating IFR too high.
Their current estimates may turn out to be too high or too low, but from all appearances they are making a sincere effort to address a challenging issue that is fraught with very poor quality, rapidly changing data.
They seem to be following the old saying, "when I get new information I change my mind, what do you do?" Good for them.
Edit: I just saw @jhm's post and agree it's a waste of time discussing the gory details of this here. I personally think it is useful to factor in IFR estimates into my thinking of how things are likely to play out over the long run, and also to understand how different scientists developed their estimates. But I don't see much value in getting too far into the weeds here.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v1.full.pdf
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