Dr John P.A. Ioannidis is a professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health, as well as professor by courtesy of biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine, professor by courtesy of statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University.
In this explosive second edition of Perspectives on the Pandemic, Professor Knut Wittkowski, for twenty years head of The Rockefeller University's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design, says that social distancing and lockdown is the absolutely worst way to deal with an airborne respiratory virus. Further, he offers data to show that China and South Korea had already reached their peak number of cases when they instituted their containment measures. In other words, nature had already achieved, or nearly achieved, herd immunity.
In this "back to work" edition of Perspectives on the Pandemic, John Kirby talks with Dr. David L. Katz, the author of the much-debated March 20th New York Times op-ed, "Is Our Fight Against the Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?" Dr. Katz discusses his proposal for "total harm minimization", a plan that seeks to protect people both from Covid-19 and the host of ills that result from social isolation and economic shut-down.
"We have gone into a complete panic state", says professor Dr. Ioannidis, describing the perfect storm that led Italy into crisis. The esteemed professor believes an exaggeration of the virus' mortality rate could lead the world to a fatal scenario: a lockdown lasting up to 18 months. "Then it is not just millions of lives at stake SARS-CoV-2, but billions, if we have to protract that for so long".