This is great—thanks. My belief certainly wouldn’t be that simply because of the age structure IFR is going to be lower in developing countries. I do think that will be protective, but I also think that poor health systems will (obviously) go the other way. Some risk factors (generally more stressed immune systems) may work against them; other risk factors (lower rates of hypertension & diabetes) may work in favor. Hopefully treatment regimens will improve over time in useful ways even for resource-poor settings, but it’s hard to predict. So I completely agree with your point in the google doc that current estimates are in some sense biased toward high-capacity countries, but it’s not clear (to me) whether that would make them too high or too low overall. As you say, places with good health info are also those with high life expectancies—which means healthier but also older.
i suppose my current guess is 0.5-1% for the headline number, which is a pretty broad range but there you go. Your analysis shifted this upward a bit!
This is great—thanks. My belief certainly wouldn’t be that simply because of the age structure IFR is going to be lower in developing countries. I do think that will be protective, but I also think that poor health systems will (obviously) go the other way. Some risk factors (generally more stressed immune systems) may work against them; other risk factors (lower rates of hypertension & diabetes) may work in favor. Hopefully treatment regimens will improve over time in useful ways even for resource-poor settings, but it’s hard to predict. So I completely agree with your point in the google doc that current estimates are in some sense biased toward high-capacity countries, but it’s not clear (to me) whether that would make them too high or too low overall. As you say, places with good health info are also those with high life expectancies—which means healthier but also older.
i suppose my current guess is 0.5-1% for the headline number, which is a pretty broad range but there you go. Your analysis shifted this upward a bit!
so glad to see this discussion
who are you RootPi and can you reach me at ALLFED.info?