Your comment doesn’t make any sense because how would the absence of an infection ever arrive at a debilitating outcome and thus be a point of comparison? The parent claimed COVID doesn’t cause debilitating outcomes. I provided evidence it does, including specific use of the exact term by medical researchers. When they couldn’t refute that, they made an ambiguous appeal to other infections to distract from being wrong, trying to shift attention from their original, unsupported claim to a new claim (COVID is the same as other viruses), and demanding that I provide evidence contrary to that. But that’s separate from the truth or falsity of the original claim, and thus irrelevant.
> Your comment doesn’t make any sense because how would the absence of an infection ever arrive at a debilitating outcome and thus be a point of comparison?
Base rate in the population in general, which would be a mix of various infections and not. For the no-infection part: those particular ones, for example, could be caused by aging.
> When they couldn’t refute that, they made an ambiguous appeal to other infections to distract from being wrong
This is controlled for by the NOS ranking of the studies in the meta analysis, but since you didn’t actually read it and are arguing from your priors, I guess you wouldn’t have observed that.
Of course it's not. "Flu causes exactly the same symptoms" is a radically different scenario than "flu doesn't cause any of these symptoms", which is different again than "Covid causes 20% more symptoms than flu". As far as i know, it's mostly likely that last one(?) But I'm not really sure, which is why I asked.
Regardless, it's important to put these figures in context.