Thanks - appreciate your insight here

In general I'm not as turned off by their extrapolation as others because like you I understand its flaws. That said as you pointed out others won't and it's irresponsible of them to thus mislead those folks.

In my opinion, the mistake they made is expressing their extrapolation as nothing more than a lower bound estimate for a fatality rate.

The mathematician in me looks for boundaries. I think if they couched their estimate as yet another guess at a lower bound for IFR they would have been better received by your community.

Sure there's sampling bias in what they collected. Yes it's wrong to apply those positive result percentages to large populations. There are several bad assumptions required to do so.

But if they simply had said, "hey we're going to make some guesses now. The point is to show that the upper range for expected fatalities is very likely much lower than what we assumed when we decided to lockdown. That's it - what we do with that estimate is up to policy makers. That said if you're joe q average and you are operating under the assumptions from January that it's very likely that if you go outside you're going to die this estimation is something else you should consider. There are flaws in our estimation and that's why we're not saying this is a prediction or a conclusion..."

If they left it at that I think their message could have had some positive impact reducing anxiety among the population and policy makers who are probably terrified of making a decision that ends up to people needlessly dying. Instead they went whole hog and called masking unnecessary and "open up!"

Stay safe - I'm sorry if our demands on your time are taking away from sleep and healthy habits. We all owe you 1390429038 drinks of your choosing after this.