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2nd April 2020 was 15 days ago. Since then the curve has taken off in the states. Here is what I wrote in another thread about this interview
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SA
April 3, 2020 at 20:10
Its a very interesting interview of course and Dr Ioannidis is a very respectable figure. But it is also very complex and has its limitations in a quickly moving situation. He has an important message in the start which is that the data is not solid and then starts to explain why it is so. He does not deny the gravity of the infection and the way it has spread but advises caution about jumping to conclusions. I am sort of paraphrasing what he said. Early on in an epidemic, he says you should attempt to slow down the spread by diagnosis of all cases, isolation and contact tracing, something which seems to have happened only in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Widespread testing has not been carried out much in Europe and USA for not very well reasons and in some way if the two months lead that we had, had been better utilised, we might have nipped it in the bud, but now prolonged agony will probably not suppress the disease enough to control it and the economic cost in terms of destroyed economies and poverty will probably kill more people than the disease. He discussed some data from one of the cruise ships which suggests that 20% of passengers were infected and a death rate of 1%. But this was a very well defined group which is easy to monitor. He claims that the data from Italy shows such high mortality because of the increased proportion of elderly patients in North Italy and that the infection rates and the deaths were fairly delimited to certain small geographic areas.
Be that as it may I found some of the things he said not entirely convincing. He described the presence of ARDS in some patients with Covid-19 as an anecdotal finding, which is not true as the Chinese have documented this well and in fact it was this that lead them to look for something other than flu, especially with the fairly recent SARS epidemic of 2003. He also seems to not mention the high multiplication rate. In fact one of his greatest commissions was that he never mentioned China at all. China is the only example of a country where the virus took hold and multiplied rapidly before being suppressed and almost eliminated. This omission I found strange.
Anyway when the picture evolves, as it is now rapidly, he may need to review his ideas.