Experts demolish studies suggesting COVID-19 is no worse than flu
Authors of widely publicized antibody studies “owe us all an apology,” one expert says.
In a controversial opinion piece in the biomedical news outlet STAT, population health researcher
John Ioannidis, at Stanford, argued back in mid-March that the mortality rate of COVID-19 may be much lower than expected, potentially making current lockdowns “totally irrational.” Health policy researchers Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, also both at Stanford, made a similar argument in The Wall Street Journal at the end of March. They called current COVID-19 fatality estimates—in the range of 2 percent to 4 percent—“deeply flawed.”
Ioannidis is a co-author of the study done in Santa Clara county, and Bendavid and Bhattacharya were leading researchers on both of the studies, which appeared online this month.
The new studies seem to back up the researchers’ earlier arguments. But a chorus of their peers are far from convinced. In fact, criticism of the two studies has woven a damning tapestry of Twitter threads and blog posts pointing out flaws of the studies—everything from basic math errors to alleged statistical sloppiness and sample bias.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04 ... -than-flu/
