Facebook Fact Checkers CENSURED Me When I Said Covid Infection Fatality Rate Was Around 0.1%. But What Do The Latest Studies Say?

• Facebook Fact Checkers CENSURED Me When I Said Covid Infection Fatality Rate Was Around 0.1%. But What Do The Latest Studies Say?
  by Malcolm Kendrick, https://www.rt.com/
  By Malcolm Kendrick, doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, ‘Doctoring Data – How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,’ is available here.
  The world’s top scientists can’t yet be certain how deadly Covid-19 is, so why are Facebook’s censorial police consistently flagging stories saying this is ‘misinformation’ & claiming the rate is NINE times worse than my estimate?
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  Covid-19 has impacted the world with massive force, a pandemic beyond anything seen in living memory. There has been an unprecedented reaction – some would say an unprecedented over-reaction. But what are the real figures, what is the true risk from the virus? It is very difficult to know. At the start of any pandemic, no one knows how many people have been infected. As the World Health Organization states:
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  “Under-detection of cases may be exacerbated during an epidemic, when testing capacity may be limited and restricted to people with severe cases and priority risk groups (such as frontline healthcare workers, elderly people and people with comorbidities).”
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  As a general rule, the fatality rate starts by being significantly overestimated, and then falls, as more and more people are tested, and those with mild or asymptomatic infections are identified. With swine flu, the lowest estimated infection fatality rate – the total number of people who die after being infected, whether or not they suffer any symptoms – 10 weeks into the pandemic was one in a thousand. It ended up at two in ten thousand. Five times lower.
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  A few weeks ago, I suggested that the final infection rate from Covid-19 could be as low as 0.1%. By which I mean that out of every one thousand people infected, one would die. This created something of a storm, and various self-appointed fact checking ‘authorities’ decreed that this figure was completely wrong. Under the heading ‘What is the real death rate’ it was stated that:
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  “By looking at English data, it is clear that the death rate in this country must be much higher than 0.1%. The researchers who conducted the REACT-2 survey produced a more detailed analysis, which estimated an overall death rate that is nine times higher, at about 0.9%.”
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  Of course, this is important to get right. If the infection fatality rate is 0.1%, then the total number of deaths in the UK will top out at around 67,000. If it is 0.9%, the final death toll could be over 500,000, which means we have (potentially) another 450,000 deaths to go. Indeed, it is the fear of the ‘450,000’ figure that is driving the renewed lockdowns.
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  So, where do we stand now? The figures are still all over place, with some perhaps more reliable than others. Interestingly, the WHO (perhaps inadvertently) estimated the rate at far lower than 0.9%. Around two weeks ago, Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, stated the WHO estimated that 750 million people have been infected worldwide:
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  “An estimated 750 million, or 10 per cent of the world’s population, have been infected by Covid-19, World Health Organisation (WHO) official Dr Mike Ryan has said.”
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  At the time of his statement, there had been just over one million deaths recorded worldwide (1,034,068 to be fully accurate). Using these two figures, the IFR can be easily calculated. It is 1,034,068/750,000,000 = 0.138%. How accurate is this figure? Well, who knows for certain? It is probably as accurate as most other current estimates.
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  It is true the fatality rates currently differ widely from country to country, influenced by other factors such as age and health. In Singapore, there have been nearly 60,000 ‘cases’ recorded, with 28 deaths. This represents a case fatality rate of 0.02%.
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  As for Iceland, which was (proportionately) the most tested population in the world, and used as a benchmark in the early days of the pandemic, things have moved on. As of late October, they have had just over 4,000 ‘cases’ of Covid-19 and 11 deaths.
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  This represents a case fatality rate of 0.26%. You may have noticed my switch to ‘case fatality rate’. Case fatality rate means (or used to mean) those with symptoms of the disease, not just those infected. So, the case fatality rate will always be higher than the infection fatality rate, as the infection fatality rate includes those with no symptoms. Many of whom will be untested and undetected.
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  Another paper by Prof. Ioannidis looking at the global Infection Fatality Rate came to the conclusion that it stood, as of October 7, at 0.15‐0.20%.
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  read more.

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