what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label Wolfgang Wodarg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wolfgang Wodarg. Show all posts

Saturday, March 21, 2020

A voice in the wilderness

Earlier in the week I praised an English doctor for the calm, graphical way he explained the current pandemic.
Today I want to draw your attention to a German doctor who has been calmly suggesting that governments have been panicked into extreme measures by their failure to understand the specifics of statistical measurement and reporting.
My first reaction was that the guy was a right-wing denialist – like Brazil’s right-wing President Bolsonaro - but his style seems a bit too professional for that – and indeed, when I checked on Wikipedia, it was to discover that he is not only mainstream SDP but is currently the Deputy-Head of the German Delegation to the Council of Europe
Dr Wolfgang Wodarg is a lung specialist (pulmonologist) and starts his presentation (subtitled in English) by explaining there are 100 types of virus - which are constantly changing. He quotes research from Glasgow which looked at some ten viruses in which Coronavirus was always present – although only some 7-15% of viruses he says are of the Coronavirus strain.
Wutan, he points out, is China’s largest laboratory for the testing for viruses and has, therefore, a large number of medical researchers who found this strain on about 50 people they were testing. This was duly put into the global data base and picked up in Berlin who did a test and passed the results to WHO for some sort of certification…..

At this point the explanation got a bit cryptic and seemed to suggest a contrast between how the WHO handles validation requests from pharmaceutical companies, on the one hand, and research institutes on the other. Basically Wodarg seems to argue that WHO registered the new strain very easily….without actually knowing how dangerous the new strain was….That requires epidemiological data going back some years – whether for the general population, for those presenting with symptoms let alone for those in hospitals or in critical care. The percentage of those with the virus will start at about 8% but move up to almost 100% for those critically ill…   

I think he says Germany would normally expect 2-3,000 deaths a year from flu and this should be borne in mind in all the current focus on the death rate  
He faults the virologists for creating something sensational – which first impressed the Chinese authorities…...and then got picked up by the global media

Wodarg’s arguments – available on his blog - have caused quite a storm in Germany apparently – although I have not been able to check that discussion out so far. I am a sceptic by nature and very much enjoy books such as those of Ben Goldacre
If he is correct, of course this would massively boost the cause of the “Denialists” – which must be a thought worrying some experts….
One thing does, however, puzzle me – why Wodarg does not simply argue that we should be keeping the number of deaths in perspective. In other words be deducting from the gross number presented in the news reports the 0.1% of deaths expected from flu… 
Instead he seems to be denying there is an issue

The doctor does, however, seem one of these “outsiders” I have discussed quite recently in these posts with one foot in the medical camp and another in the political. 
People who straddle different worlds are able to resist groupthink – and it is significant that, at the end of the youtube presentation, he quotes from my favourite fairy story – “The Emperor who had no clothes”.

Update; Germany is apparently experiencing a low and flattening death rate at 0.3% (compared to both Italy's 9% and UK's 4.6%) according to this article - although Monday we were being told that some regional authorities were being slow in returning their statistics! 
But the UK seems still to be farting about as two blogs from opposite ends of the political spectrum indicate first from Boffy and today on Richard North’s site  
And this article shows how much of an outlier the UK has become


The pic is the last painting done by Egon Schiele a few days before he and his wife succumbed to the Spanish Flu in 1918. He was 28