Top story from people in the field. It's a pity that they don't interpret the data quite correctly. It does not undermine everything, but I still want to set the record straight.
It is a reasoning error that I have heard before, also from prominent virologists:
“Of the tests, 60% are positive. There have been x deaths. Calculated over the entire population, that means a mortality rate of only 0.01%.“
So they assume an infection rate of 60% and calculate how many people that is in their country. They compare the mortality rates to that. That is a methodological error.
The tests are not randomized, let alone representative of the population. The vast majority of tests (especially in the Netherlands) are carried out when COVID-19 is suspected. That is why the test percentages of the RIVM are meaningless.
So you have to have a separate story to be able to prove that there are no more COVID patients among those tested than in the rest of the population. That was precisely the strength of the Sanquin blood test: it came a lot closer to representativeness. Then they came to an infection rate of 3%. That is about 500,000 Dutch people and with the mortality rate at that time, that came to a mortality of about 1.3%. That is quite high, but by no means not in the category of SARS, MERS or Ebola. That runs into the tens of percents.
Yet the doctors in the video extrapolate the results to the entire population. Without distinction between test methods, random accountability, whatever. Then of course you get a huge overestimation of the number of infections. The mortality rate (an absolute fact) is therefore very small in percentage. After all, you assume far too many infections.
An eye-opener of the video for me was that we are now lying flat waiting for a vaccine, but that we are massively ignoring the annual flu vaccine (Read here more about the Dutch situation)
Some other of their other points (from a FB post by Stefan Noordhoek)
2) almost all hospitals (in the US) are at minimum capacity, perhaps only in NYC not, but in the rest of the country they are. So all kinds of people are NOT treated there. That costs many lives. This is also (still) the case in the Netherlands.
3) measures are contradictory and have no scientific basis whatsoever, and the most important:
4) You build up your immune system by exposing yourself to bacteria and viruses. Because we all go 'into lockdown', we weaken our immune system and we are extra vulnerable if we suddenly start seeing/meeting each other again.
And point 4 therefore means that the virus could find many more vulnerable people after the lockdown than it does now.
