Where are these assumptions coming from?
It's pretty obvious from my use of "imagine" that this is a thought experiment to make a mathematical point.
People will read something like this and just see the 0.15%, not the faulty logic that led to that number.
There's nothing faulty here. It's a simple mathematical fact. What exactly is your statistical training?
Also, the "true" population IFR necessarily includes people in nursing homes and their risk profiles.
Obviously... that's exactly what the calculation is doing. Again, what is your statistical training?
COVID risk isn't just "old people die and nobody else does."
OK?
Across age groups, COVID is roughly 9-10x more deadly than the flu.
a) Did you even attempt to verify this statement? Your chart (which I'm taking at face value) says there were an average of 206 flu deaths per season in the 0-4 age group, 305 in the 5-16 age group, and 2,309 in the 18-49 age group. So far (numbers from here), there have been 51 COVID-19 deaths recorded in the 0-4 age group, 54 in the 5-14 age group, and 8,182 in the 15-44 age group. I.e., the numbers are far lower than the flu for young people, and maybe about 4x as many for the working age age group.
b) You are conflating the IFR (which this entire section was actually about) with the total number of deaths. Probably somewhere around a third of Americans (i.e., well over 100 million) have been infected with COVID-19 at this point, which is likely around 5x higher than the number of people who get the flu in an average year.
Also, younger age groups lost more life-years to COVID than the elderly.
There is absolutely zero reason to believe the people who died from COVID-19 had an average number of life years left. This is completely disingenuous given what is widely known about the disease at this point. And if you're going to make these kinds of comparisons, you should be weighing them against the quality-adjusted life years (not just life years) that will be lost due to the lockdowns. See my thread here for a small sampling of the short-term consequences of the lockdowns, much less the long-term consequences.
Responsible epidemiologists knew that COVID was far more dangerous than the flu back in March, and now we see that view was fully vindicated.
Ioannidis repeatedly said COVID-19 was a dangerous disease for the elderly and those with significant comorbidities, and that they should be protected, so I agree he has been vindicated.
