id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-266989-n040i865	Ioannidis, John P. A.	Coronavirus disease 2019: The harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures	2020-04-09		.txt	text/plain	2568	167	52	• A highly flawed nonpeer-reviewed preprint claiming similarity with HIV-1 drew tremendous attention, and it was withdrawn, but conspiracy theories about the new virus became entrenched • Even major peer-reviewed journals have already published wrong, sensationalist items • Early estimates of the projected proportion of global population that will be infected seem markedly exaggerated • Early estimates of case (infection) fatality rate may be markedly exaggerated • The proportion of undetected infections is unknown but probably varies across countries and may be very large overall • Reported epidemic curves are largely affected by the change in availability of test kits and the willingness to test for the virus over time • Of the multiple measures adopted, a few have strong evidence, and many may have obvious harms • Panic shopping of masks and protective gear and excess hospital admissions may be highly detrimental to health systems without offering any concomitant benefit • Extreme measures such as lockdowns may have major impact on social life and the economy (and those also lives lost), and estimates of this impact are entirely speculative • Comparisons with and extrapolations from the 1918 influenza pandemic are precarious, if not outright misleading and harmful pandemic suggest that early adoption of social distancing measures was associated with lower peak death rates.	./cache/cord-266989-n040i865.txt	./txt/cord-266989-n040i865.txt