[jhpriestley]

I don't quite know what to make of the WHO estimate. I can't find further details about it. I don't think it makes sense to take this estimate and try to extract an IFR from it. They could be suggesting that the IFR of the virus is much lower than expected, but they could also be suggesting that deaths have been badly undercounted (e.g. in areas with poor health infrastructure), or that it has spread more widely among younger populations in places like Africa, where IFR would be expected to be much lower.

Bhattacharya's estimate is being criticized because, even though he was taking a contrarian view on the virus and getting results that were out of wack with other lines of evidence, he rushed out a highly flawed study (the Santa Clara seroprevalence study). This came out when we had little data about antibody prevalence, his study was one of the first ones, and it had the big name of Stanford behind it, so it was reported very widely and misled an awful lot of people about how dangerous this virus is. In his position he should have been bending over backwards to make sure he was on sure footing and not misleading the public, and instead he let this paper full of basic mistakes go to press.