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Friday, April 17, 2020

Post #4564 Rant of the Day: Dr. Oz and the COVID-19 Alarmists

Literally 24 hours ago I had no idea I would be writing this post. Dr. Oz stumbled into a kerfuffle with the COVID-19 alarmists in answering a question on reopening the economy, in particular looking at schools. He didn't want to set unrealistic expectations that COVID-19 infections and fatalities are going away anytime soon. We are still learning a lot about novel aspects of the coronavirus, A vaccine is likely several months away and it would be difficult at best to develop herd immunity without a sufficient ability of naturally acquired (e.g., through recovery from infection) or through vaccines. Note, in fact, vaccines aren't 100% effective and some people cannot tolerate them.

So the question is when is it safe to come out of quarantine? Note even with endemic diseases like the seasonal flu, we still have infections and casualties without shutting down the economy or schools. I'm not trying to compare COVID-19 with the flu, like Trump ineptly did. Among other things, most people don't have antibodies (from past exposure or vaccines), and COVID-19 is airborne, arguably more serious, and more contagious. But the point is we don't close the economy over the flu, despite the modest risk. We don't ban school buses despite the possibility of fatal accidents. We could go on at some length with other examples (e.g., school shootings),

In any event, Dr. Oz gives out a number for infected child deaths like "2% of total mortality" and hastily adds, "Of course, any casualty is unfortunate." (I'm paraphrasing.) But the damage was done; I think the progressives believe Oz said something like "we find a 2% fatality rate for returning students acceptable". (See sample tweet reply below.) It is clear, to me, in context that Oz is talking a minor percentage of a fatality count, not a fatality rate. (This is why I explicitly cite a dictionary in one of my thread collection tweets below.) In fact, the overall estimate is roughly 1.4% and Fauci admitted it may be under 1% (although recent rates have ballooned to nearly 5%) and younger people (say, 10 through young adult) have been assessed with much lower than average. Not to mention that the mortality rate is based on the infected, not the whole population, in this context public school population.

In a certain way, Dr. Oz should have been much more careful in talking about fatalities, like in the manner I broke things out in responding to the reporter's tweet below. There's nothing wrong with what he said, but he probably needed to clarify the use of fatality counts vs rates. I would have also probably reminded viewers that children with fragile health conditions are especially vulnerable and may need to be quarantined longer.

I have to confess I love to get into the weeds of methodological issues. In this Atlantic piece, the author suggests a 20% positive rate for COVID-19 diagnostic testing is probably indicative of a much wider infection base, probably with doctors rationing testing to more likely symptomatic patients; he also suggests a blip in people dying at home may reflect the complications of unknown COVID-19 infections. McCarthy points out a similar point as apparently 3000 people more than expected deaths occurred recently in NYC, and many have now been linked to COVID-19 NOT BY TEST but on medical history and reported symptoms; so New York classified many of those subjective estimates under CDC guidelines. (Similarly, Wuhan China also bumped up its reported COVID-19 deaths based on at-home deaths.)











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