[This is the paper I currently use to debate IFR.](
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....full.pdf+html)
I’ve found most people who aren’t taking an active interest in following the circus that is going on around us have a very limited understanding of the actual data and risks on all fronts. Most of them read something from early on in the pandemic, or saw a meme, or saw a misinformed fear based Reddit comment, and have clung to it for dear life, shooting down any new information or rebuttal as “misinformation.”
It definitely doesn’t help that essentially all of the data about this pandemic is shoddy, mismanaged, unstandardized, lacking context, and often intentionally misrepresented or obfuscated. You can go and find anything that will back up almost any point being made depending on what contextless and narrow “study” you find. It’s particularly difficult to locate *contextual* data, like any hospital data related to the capacities of ICUs before covid and during regular flu seasons, any kind of location based testing rates , etc.
Like a fear mongering article will come out saying child cases have increased 600% in your area and also say child hospitalizations are rising. But then you have to dig into multiple articles and databases to discover that cases went up because XYZ school districts started mass testing in children and there are no reports of any deaths and only a couple hospitalizations among those cases. Then you dig further and find out the hospitalizations that the original article are referring to are for RSV outbreaks or mental health or postponed regular care. Yet the article left out important information needed to understand what was going on, and instead intended for you to assume the hospitalizations and covid cases were linked.
I’m fairly sure some of it is intentional fear mongering and data obfuscation but I’m more sure that most of it is journalists who don’t understand statistics, are lazy and incompetent, and draw lines where there are none to shove out a sensationalist article and get clicks. And honestly this misinformation is what keeps this circus going.