*EDIT* Did you just cite a twitter post that links to some dudes blog as if it were a reliable source of medical information?
* EDIT to the EDIT * Did you notice that this dudes blog is PAID, and requires a subscription to access?
Some dude? Really?
"Sir David John Spiegelhalter OBE FRS [..] is a British statistician and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. From 2007 to 2018 he was Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge [..] He is currently Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge"[0] He was invited to join SAGE[1] in April 2020 as a "scientific expert"[2]
I'm afraid at this point I'm obliged to quote Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Spiegelhalter [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/scientific-advis... [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5ed1327f86650...
> Note added 2nd May 2020. Some people seem to be interpreting this article as suggesting that COVID does not add to one’s normal risk. I should make it clear that I am suggesting that it roughly doubles your risk of dying this year.
The book is titled "Covid by Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic with Data". I've only skimmed it, but it seems to be well regarded.
I'm not sure that peer-reviewed research deserves to be put on a pedestal. I've worked in a research lab, I have a couple of [tedious and uninteresting] published papers. It's not a holy grail. We still employ humans to do this stuff, and they come with flaws. We also need funding for this stuff, and with it comes with warped incentives.
> the first article you cite starts with the below disclaimer, which seems to refute your claim
Why would it refute the claim?
If you double a very tiny risk, to all intents and purposes it may still be "very tiny", and irrelevant compared to other more significant risks (such as the increased risk of dying due to not having been able to attend your screening appointment because all non-critical healthcare in your area has been cancelled to "save lives", while achieving the opposite).
We can and should trust doctors at an individual level, but at planet scale we need to listen to statisticians too. That didn't happen during the pandemic.
It's pretty unfortunate if a "cure" ends up killing more people than the disease... and yes, there were people mentioning this concern already in early 2020, but apparently no-one was listening:
"A fierce debate is under way between those who believe that the current lockdowns in place across much of the world are an overreaction, and those who believe it would be barbaric to do anything other than try to avoid as many coronavirus deaths as possible. Those in the first camp [..] point out things like [..] the collateral damage from the lockdowns will end up causing more harm than coronavirus itself; and that the amount of money we are effectively spending on saving each life is completely out of whack with what we would normally consider reasonable."
Are you ln favor of taking medical advice from Twitter rather than doctors?
