Something that’s missing from Ioannidis’ IFR paper is the excess death figures, ie. the rise above the average over five years or so. That’s a pretty bad omission, because covid-19 deaths are tallied differently by different health authorities in different countries.
There’s a lot of talk from the anti-lockdown crowd about tests and their supposed inaccuracy, yet the annual flu mortality figures have usually been compiled by tallying clinical diagnoses and adjusting by comparing with excess death figures, rather than by testing for the presence of a flu virus.
No, I’m not a member of the scientific community. I have an interest in science, I aspire to scientific literacy, and I’ve spent considerable time trying to defend scientific reasoning from New Age Hippies who denigrate it as “just another belief system” that is no more or less valid than “ancient wisdom”. I’m also someone who got pissed off with conspiracy theories after I’d seen a few of them for what they really are.