I did back it up. The data is straight from the coronavirus dashboard. Very easy to check.
And I've posted data from a Government site which clearly disproves your claim that only 8 million people were infected.
Frankly I'm surprised to see this kind of response from a site admin. In all the years I've been on this forum you've come across as very reasoned and well-balanced, yet on this subject you seem to lose all composure when someone in good faith presents an interpretation of data which contradicts your views.
I could say the feeling is mutual and frankly I'm surprised to see this kind of response from a forum member, but the authoritarian regime we are living in has resulted in many unpleasantries I've become immune to such surprises and disappointment, so I am not really that surprised any more!
Nevertheless, I am well prepared for false claims, having done much research myself. If you keep making false claims, I'll keep debunking them!
If you look a bit more carefully at my post, you'll see that I'm talking about a timeframe from the end of September (when full scale testing was well underway) to the present. I have deliberately excluded the first 6 months of the outbreak when everyone acknowledges that testing was only picking up a small fraction of cases.
I think you are deliberately distorting and cherry picking data in order to back up the absurd 2% infection fatality rate claim, which is massively inflated. I've not seen any reputable source claim that the IFR is anywhere near as high as that.
While testing from September onwards will still be an underestimate, it won't be massively so.
Why not? I know of many people who are reluctant to get tested, and there are many reports of this being even more severe in many parts of the country.
Yes I agree the extent of underestimation will be much lower now than earlier in the pandemic; we may be down from a tiny fraction of cases to perhaps half of cases being picked up.
I've known people tell me know relatives of theirs had very mild or no symptoms and only got tested because they were a contact of someone who had a positive test. There must be a
huge quantity of undiagnosed infections.
I very roughly estimated that the testing may be picking up about half the cases.
Yes
now it is probably about half, I'd agree with you on that, but earlier it was far, far higher.
A further look at the data source you provided appears to back this up. The chart below shows the percentage testing positive for antibodies. We can see that there was around a 10% increase from end of September to mid-January. That's 5.6 million people. Over the same time period, according to the coronavirus dashboard the cumulative total number of cases in England went up from 300,000 to 3 million, a net increase of 2.7 million. So the testing appears to be picking up around half of cases, as I estimated.
Only in recent weeks would we be picking up as many as that, in my opinion.
There is
no way the IFR is anywhere near 2% and no amount of cherry picking of data is going to change that.
I've edited my earlier post to include links to, and quotes from, numerous sources which indicate how a number of compounding factors are
massively reducing the seroprevalence estimates.
You are deliberately overestimating the IFR (by a factor of about four at least), which is presumably to justify harsh restrictions and to induce more fear into the population?
Given the IFR is clearly
far lower than the 2% you claim it is, this completely undermines your argument, which appears to hinge on vastly inflated IFR estimates.