Your reference is very good. It is still a pre-print, but the breakdown is very informative. It estimates the IFR (Table 4)
for ages between 0-34 as 0.01% (1 in 10,000), increasing exponentially from there. The estimated IFR for the next age group, people between 34-54, is between 0.04% and 0.2% (1 in 2,500 to 1 in 500), one to two orders of magnitude greater. For people over 85, the IFR is 36.8% (~1 in 3).
Note that the population over 34 is about 50% of the total in the US.
I think people need to dial back a bit and mention that just because you didn't die from infection - doesn't mean you are 100% the way you were pre-infection.
I rarely see mentions too that just because the mortality rate is lower for younger/healthy people - why does that exclude them potentially transmitting it to older folk?
And also possibly getting the most sick you'll ever get in your life, with possible long term effects. Like how exactly does that sound like a reasonable risk to take so you can go to the gym?
I agree completely. It is very easy to dismiss the problem if you are young and you only look at your individual risk. But if you look at society as a whole, the problem is significantly more complicated.
Possibly.. but even this thread I was felt like there were more mentions to just purely stats of IFR by age group as if that was all that matters and they were very active in this thread.
It's good to know it's being brought up when people mention IFR of age groups as if that "proves" we shouldn't worry about it.
An almost meaningless number when not controlled for age, ethnicity, general health etc.
I don't understand how this number can be reasonably used to say anything about basically anything.
From the document you site:
> Many such serological surveys are currently being
> undertaken worldwide [10], and some have thus far
> suggested substantial under-ascertainment of cases, with estimates of IFR converging at approximately 0.5 - 1% [10-12].
But if we follow reference 12, we get the following IFR study from Stockholm[1]:
> Results:
> Age 0–69 Population %: 88.3, IFR: 0.09%
> Age 70+, Population %: 11.7, IFR: 4.29%
Now, which number applies to the vast majority of us? And this is not even controlled for anything but age.
You said there was no data available, and I provided a reference.
The data you cite has a large age group as well (0-69), which has the same problem you describe. See the comment by user kmm below for a reference with a better breakdown of estimated IFR by age groups. The reference also shows how the IFR increases exponentially by age.
If you want to see what number applies to you in particular, then you need an specific breakdown. But if you need to see what is the risk for the population in general, then the estimated total IFR, sampled from that same population, is valuable. Think of individual risk vs systemic risk.
I absolutely agree with your general argument about the context of _average_ mortality rate.
However another aspect that is still very nebulious at this point is post-infection sequelae.
Some of the patients who survived SARS-1 infection (in the SARS 2002-2004 outbreak) had lung scaring, loss of VO2 max, and other pulmonary related disfunction, more than 10 years after infection. [0]
We have seen a lot of pre-print articles discussing SARS-COV2 lung damage, heart and blood vessel damage, peripheral nerve damage, etc.
So if we want to be factual and give people a chance of making an informed decision, then we should also take this aspect in consideration.
At this point, we simply don't know enough about who will be affected and how severely but if take what we learned from SARS-COV1, than it is iresponsible not to disclose that life long injury or damage with _varying_ degrees of intensity across potentially multiple systems is very likely for _some_ of the survivors of SARS-COV2.
My point is an informed decision of not following health authority guidelines (which, at this point of social isolation, I do not judge), should not be reduced to something binomial like survival/death, it's just not that simple (as with most things in life).
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...