Weekend Unthreaded

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Friday Open Thread

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Two Californians doctors say the mortality rate is like the flu, but it was sampling bias instead

A few people are asking about the video the Youtube removed which is now on Bitchute. (h/t AC Osborne) The cack hand of Youtube strikes again with unnecessary censorship. But even if the docs were wrong, it’s better to discuss why than try to disappear them — we can all learn something. Plus the censorship gives them a de facto kind of hero status among some, but for the wrong reasons.

The Doctors main point is a sampling bias error

Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care are ER doctors, they look convincing, and speak well, but their thesis rests entirely on an error. They take test results from a high risk group of people, and extrapolate the results to the whole state. What they have is non-randomized data, and they assume it represents millions of people who didn’t come out for testing. This is not a small or incidental point. It’s the foundation of nearly everything they say.

They repeat this same mistake over and over, and say “we are following The Science”. They come up with some just-so rationalizations, some truisms that aren’t true, and inject some superfluous vocabulary in there so people know they […]

Indonesian study: Low Vitamin D patients ten times more likely to die of Coronavirus

Wow. If this is confirmed, Coronavirus is almost a disease of Vitamin D deficiency

Missing out on the Sunshine Vitamin?

Hot off the press: A new Indonesian study of 780 people with Coronavirus found that people with a Vitamin D deficiency were much more likely to die. We discussed Vitamin D at length a few weeks ago, so we already knew Vitamin D is associated with a lower rate of respiratory illness, but the results here are quite remarkable.

Of those who died most (85%) had a co-morbidity, the real surprise is that even more than that, 96% had low Vitamin D levels. Of those who survived, most people had normal Vitamin D levels. Only 7% of survivors had low or deficient Vitamin D. That is quite a split.

Vitamin D deficiency was very common among these Indonensian patients. Half of those measured did not have enough Vitamin D in their blood. Of those that did, 96% survived, and only 4% “expired”. Vitamin D looks like a good protector.

After controlling for known risk like being old, or male or having high blood pressure, a Vitamin D level described as deficient (less than 20ng/ml) was associated with a 10 […]