Just 0.05% of healthy under-70s with coronavirus will die from it, study claims
JUST 0.05 per cent of healthy people under the age of 70 who are infected with coronavirus will die from it, a study has claimed.
New research from Stanford University suggests Covid-19 infection-fatality rate (IFR) could be much lower than previously estimated.
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It's five times lower than his previous estimate which suggests the IFR for all age groups was 0.25 per cent.
By comparison, seasonal flu is deadly for around 0.1 per cent of those who catch it.
Dr Ioannidis is currently under investigation at Stanford for allegedly underestimating the lethality of Covid-19.
It comes after he released a study which claimed coronavirus was 54 times more prevalent than thought in April.
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Now his latest research has been criticised by other scientists who claim he used data from their studies incorrectly to establish the IFR figure.
He based his new estimate on a review of 61 different antibody testing surveys carried out globally.
The samples ranged from as low as 0.1 per cent in the Bay area of California to 53.4 per cent in Barrio Padre Mugica, Argentina.
Dr Ioannidis took the data from each region and divided the number of Covid deaths by the number of people estimated to be infected.
He added that the low infection rate estimated is "simply a consequence of the low quality of the review itself and has very little to do with when the estimates were made".
Another student, Fabian Boetzl, an ecologist at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, said he "cannot understand" how Dr Ioannidis arrived at his rates because "it is not really described in the manuscript".
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In a statement, a WHO spokesperson said: "The Bulletin of the World Health Organization was created by WHO as a forum for public health experts to publish their findings, express their views and engage a wider audience on critical public health issues of the day.
"Consequently, the views expressed by the writers in these pages do not necessarily represent the views of WHO."