👩🏿‍🔧 🌰 💃🏼 Coronavirus: how we deceive ourselves 👊🏾 👍🏼 🏕️

I perfectly understand that the degree of hysteria against the background of coronavirus has led society to a conflict between followers and deniers of general panic. Rather acute group polarization did not cause much desire to express their point of view on the general public. But when conspiracy theories and thoughtless interpretations of the data began to haunt me everywhere, I realized that there were very few comforting arguments and decided to fill up their deficit.

Distortion of mortality

I am sure for many it will be a revelation that the number of deaths in the presence of coronavirus recorded by WHO is not the number of deaths from coronavirus.

What did you think? A new infection for mankind has not yet been fully studied, but in a hospital from a suburb of some Livorno already know how to determine the death from it? To name the cause of death is not a catch during compilation. Everything is much more complicated.

There is a final clinical diagnosis. The underlying disease may include several nosological forms. There is the concept of competing diseases, which simultaneously suffered the deceased and each of which individually could lead to death.

There is also a conclusion about the cause of death based on the results of postmortem autopsy, as well as cases of its discrepancy with the final clinical diagnosis, which are resolved by an expert commission.

That is why WHO writes in black and white :

Determining the true mortality of COVID-19 requires additional time. Today's data indicate that the overall mortality rate is 3-4%, while the mortality rate from infection will be lower.

UFO Care Minute

The pandemic COVID-19, a potentially severe acute respiratory infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (2019-nCoV), has officially been announced in the world. There is a lot of information on Habré on this topic - always remember that it can be both reliable / useful, and vice versa.

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However, most people never delve into the methodology of any research. It is enough for them to see the words “cases” and “deaths” in one tablet in order to arbitrarily put forward their interpretation of these data - “mortality from coronavirus”.

Such a superficial study of a worrying issue leads to a distorted perception of reality. A coronavirus infected person who jumped out of a window or died of stage IV cancer, millions of people on our planet will unknowingly consider a victim of a terrible epidemic. The situation is so absurd that I would not be surprised if someone has my direct quote from WHO with a link to the source that causes doubt.

Why then publish such a mortality? - some will ask. As an analyst, I’ll answer that there are proxy values in statistics. And in our case, for example, it is possible to compare them with total or natural mortality . Yes, there will be a large share of the error, but you can study a new infection for a long time, and the World Health Organization needs to act quickly.

Italian precedent

Within the Chinese borders, a much smaller number of people were bothered by the coronavirus. A new surge of hysteria arose against the backdrop of a frightening information field in Italy and the sharp actions of the local government.

More than 12,000 infected , about 1,000 deaths and strict quarantine. Italy makes us especially worried about the health of our parents and the elderly, since in Italy, the largest number of deaths among those infected occur in people near the retirement age and older.

I have been to Italy and, in comparison with Russia, the numerical superiority of senior citizens on the streets is noticeable even with the naked eye. Recollections of this gave me the idea of the need to study demographic data.

It turned out that in Italythe oldest population in Europe. Almost 22% of citizens over 65, the median age is 45 years. By the way, in Russia only 15% of citizens are over 65 years old, and the median is 40 years old, in the USA - 16% and 38 years old, respectively. Now let's take a look at the distribution of coronavirus by age:

Obviously, the high mortality rate among infected Italians is primarily due to the age factor. Conviction in the opposite indicates a misunderstanding of the error of the base percentage . For those who doubt my words, I recommend reading an article in Scientific American .

At the same time, looking at the graph, we see that older people are much more likely to become infected, even in a proportional proportion. Hence the hypothesis that the immunity of the elderly is less adapted to the coronavirus.

But such a phenomenon is not characteristic of the coronavirus as a whole. In Korea , for example, the main group of people infected is between 20 and 29 years old - 29% of the total. In China, about 15% of those infected are 70+, which is almost half as much as in Italy or France .

I remind you that coronavirus is not a true cause of death. Therefore, we cannot argue that the risk of mortal danger to coronavirus for the elderly is multiple. But the fact remains - elderly people with confirmed coronavirus die much more often.

It is impossible not to agree that the histogram of natural mortality , disaggregated by age, will look very similar to the one you see above , because the older the person, the more likely the risk of his death. So let's try to compare mortality in the presence of infection with natural mortality .

To do this, we need to compare mortality data per thousand people from the Italian National Bureau of Statistics with data on the number of deaths among those infected fromdall'Istituto Superiore di Sanità .

The mortality rate from the first table is 1.05%, from the second - 5.8%. Does this mean that the lethality of the infection itself is somewhere around 4%? “Not at all.” You did not forget that 76% of those infected are older than 51 years old? This sample is very different from the demographics of the Italian population, and now I will illustrate this with you.

If evenly distributed, natural mortality in the 90+ category will be 24% ((180.7 + 299.6) / 2). And the value for the same group in table COVID-19 is 19%. That is, mortality among those infected is less than natural .

It is unlikely that anyone will think that the coronavirus also cures people, but many believe that every fourth person is killed. Although these are conclusions of the same degree of absurdity.

It is bad that we cannot even determine the approximate mortality rate of an infection by comparing the general values. We will definitely make a mistake in the distribution, since the tables show different age cohorts.

Moreover, data on natural mortality are based on hundreds of thousands of records, while the sample for deceased Italians with confirmed coronavirus does not exceed thousands of people. We do not know how representative this sample is.

For children, for example, the difference in mortality will also be negative, because child deaths occur, and child deaths with confirmed infection have not yet been recorded.

Look also at gender. Grannies carry the virus much better, or maybe the virus has nothing to do with it, and we are witnessing a season of increased mortality among men, which increases overall mortality? - Unknown.

There are no specific figures for the lethality of the virus. Only WHO staff can identify them. Existing private assumptions are irresponsible stupidity. My goal was to convey the idea that the risk of mortal danger of coronavirus in the minds of the majority is multiply overestimated and has nothing to do with reality.

Global collapse

We found that mortality in coronavirus is not mortality from coronavirus , and numerical indicators of natural mortality can look much worse than those from the new epidemic. However, there is an article on Habré with almost five million views and it says the following:

. 1% ( ). , - 12 , 17 .

— 6,2 . , 17 , , ≈8 (=2^(17/6)). , , 800 .

22 . , ≈16000 . , .

Where did 1% mortality come from? - It turns out that the author of the article, a certain Thomas Pueyo, was guided by the data on the situation in the cruise ship Diamond Princess: with 706 patients, 6 deaths and 100 recoveries.

Looking at these values, Thomas concludes: "the total mortality will be in the range from 1% to 6.5%." After that, he takes the most gentle percentage, with a clever movement of the brain convolutions, he shows how the virus will swallow the world and leave the reader with the thought that this was demonstrated by an even better scenario with a mortality rate of only 1%.

It simply does not fit in my head how this nonsense could so have grown on Habré. Not knowing the nuance about the lethality of the virus and mortality with it is normal. But how did programmers, mathematicians, analysts and other Habrachians make a projection of 6 deaths with 706 cases on the population of the entire planet?

In your opinion is this a representative sample? And looking at Thomas' somersault with the approval of 16,000 cases of infection based on 22 dead, does anyone really understand that the probabilities do not work like that? Didn’t you be embarrassed that the youngest Diamond Princess passenger among the dead was 70 years old ?

And this despite the fact that the causes of death of passengers are unknown . For those who still don’t see anything strange in Thomas’s arithmetic, I will quote the professor of epidemiology at Stanford UniversityJohn Ioannidis :

By projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the US population, the mortality rate among people infected with COVID-19 will be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely small data — among the 700 infected passengers and crew there were only 7 deaths — the actual mortality rate can be either five times lower (0.025%) or five times higher (0.625%).

I believe that Mr. Pueyo published his cidul with the best of intentions. But all his work is saturated with errors in the induction and implication of data. I have no time to write a detailed refutation of such amateurish work. Such articles should be blocked due to misinformation of the population.

Endless exponents

I believe that most of you have already seen similar graphs on the network. But far fewer people read WHO official reports. In one of them, published on March 6 , it is written:

One of the main differences between the Chinese virus and conventional flu is the transmission rate. Influenza has a shorter incubation period and the serial interval (time between consecutive cases) is three days. For COVID-19, this period is five to six days. This means that the flu spreads faster than the coronavirus .

So why then all of these exhibitors, inciting the reader to associations with bubonic plague? Some may indicate to me that mortality with confirmed coronavirus varies from 3% to 4%, while the immediate mortality from seasonal flu is less than 0.1%.

Again, one should not confuse general mortality with the lethality of the infection. Such a coronavirus is unknown to humanity. Therefore, you will not find the WHO claims that the high mortality rate with a margin compensates for propagation velocity and does Covid-19 is a multiple of dangerous flu.

The world has long learned to determine the lethality of influenza. Therefore, for a long time I could not find data on total mortality for him. But still I managed to meet the 2012 WHO publication on influenza-associated mortalityin China from 2003 to 2008.

Look carefully at the chart. In northern China, total flu mortality ranged from 1.5% to 3%. I want to draw your attention to the fact that you have data on the interval of 5 years for tens of millions of records. Moreover, we clearly see seasonality. Now think about the representativeness of the Covid-19 data.

Having experience in public communications, I know that there is little common sense for argumentation and sometimes it is necessary to blame authorities. Therefore, I bring you a fragment of the Washington Post conversation with Melissa Nolan, a virologist at the University of South Carolina:

Which virus is more deadly? That's a difficult question to answer for many reasons. First, health officials are not comparing analogous data sets between the viruses. They have years of influenza data but just months of covid-19 numbers - which are evolving by the day.

And, of course, I cannot but blame the attempt to project the outbreak of influenza in 1918 on today's pandemic from the article “Coronavirus: why you need to act right now . ” Probably, a comparative analysis would be useful for understanding the situation, but not a comparative analysis of Thomas Pueyo, conducted by such a clumsy method.

The world population over the past century has grown almost 3 times, the number of people over 65 has increased 10 times and the number of those over 85 has increased 30 times. Does Mr. Pueyo take these factors into account? - No. He had only one chart for Philadelphia with St. Louis to make an approximation.

However, to solve such a problem, it is necessary to determine the index weight of the entire variety of parameters, calculate the errors and calculate the correlations without allowing asymmetries. Only seasoned analysts and not Mr. Thomas, whose call for panic is replicated in millions of views, can handle this.

Pandemic of fear

Under the circumstances, the most common are two types of human behavior: indifference and panic. However, the correct attitude towards coronavirus is somewhere in between: in accordance with WHO recommendations .

By discrediting the pandemic of fear, I have never diminished the real danger of coronavirus. Clever people sit in the World Health Organization, and I advise everyone to listen to their recommendations: wash their hands, avoid public events, refuse cash, and more.

The paradox is that when these same people from WHO or Rospotrebnadzor warn us of an outbreak of seasonal flu or tick-borne encephalitis, we do not particularly respond to these messages. At least in comparison with the current situation.

The explanation for this paradox has long been known: people are irrational in nature. In addition, not everyone knows the history of coronaviruses, which were discovered already in 1965. Notice, there are a lot of them. It can be assumed that one of you has already had a mild form of acute respiratory viral infection caused by one of the representatives of the coronavirus family.

What the irresponsible press has put into the mass consciousness as a coronavirus is SARS-CoV-2, which contributes to the onset of Covid-19 disease. The last two high-profile coronaviruses were the causes of the spread of SARS and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS).

Why is the concern in the information field from Covid-19 noticeably greater than that from other coronaviruses? A difficult question, the correct answer to which, probably, can only be given by epidemiologists. For my part, I want to mention two potential causes of this phenomenon.

First: this is the multiple growth of foreign tourism in the Middle Kingdom. Secondly: the growth of the Internet audience and the emergence of social networks, where everyone allows himself to think that, without competencies and without delving into the research methodology, he knows the truth about the pandemic and has the right to give advice on how the authorities should act.

Any calls to follow the Italian scenario should be despised altogether. This is the business of the government of each country in particular. The USA, England and a number of other states, for example, act differently. And here is what epidemiologist John Ioannidis writes about this :

Mortality across the entire population at 0.05% is lower than from seasonal flu. If this is a real figure, then isolating the world with potentially enormous social and financial consequences can be completely irrational. It is as if a domestic cat attacked an elephant. And, scared and trying to avoid a cat, an elephant accidentally jumps from a cliff and dies.

Many do not even imagine how one week of partial freezing of the economy can affect the GDP. Damage will be measured not only in monetary terms, but also in human lives. Therefore, I ask all Facebook and other experts to put their opinion into oblivion.

Apotheosis

Emotional content is the most popular, with anger being the most common emotion on social networks. The probability of propagating false information is 70% higher, and more than half of the readers share the news without reading it further than the headline.

Unfortunately, fear is more viral than the truth . It’s not just that Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube have come together to fight the fakes about Sovid-19. However, proof of fallacy is more often less popular than the original statement. I would like this text to be an exception.

If you have read the entire scribble and agree with my arguments, then do not be lazy to share this article with your friends. Many thanks to all for your attention.

Sincerely, Ilya Pestov, author of Groks.

Coronavirus: how we deceive ourselves