Source: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/two-bakersfield-doctors-cite-their-testing-data-to-urge-reopening/article_eb1959e0-84fa-11ea-9a07-2f2bea880bf9.html
Apr 23, 2020
Before COVID-19 was even detected in the United States, Dan Erickson, a former emergency room physician who now co-owns Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, bought as many tests for the virus as he could. He knew it would be here eventually and wanted to be ready to test those who needed and wanted it.
Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi from Accelerated Urgent Care held a news conference April 22 at their Coffee Road facility to talk about coronavirus trends and the impact on the economy.
Now, after testing thousands of people, he and his business partner, physician Artin Massihi, say they have enough data to draw some conclusions about COVID-19.
Their message: COVID-19 is more ubiquitous and less deadly than we think. It's similar to influenza and we should therefore reopen society and stop treating the situation like the lethal menace it was initially thought to be.
"Two months ago we didn't know this so I'm bringing it to light now," Erickson said Wednesday at a news conference held at his Coffee Road urgent care.
Kern County Public Health Services Spokeswoman Michelle Corson and an epidemiologist contacted by The Californian said they didn't agree with the doctors' recommendation to end social distancing and immediately start reopening society.
"This is a many-headed hydra. It’s really unfortunate to boil this all down to it’s just flu," said Andrew Noymer, associate professor of public health at UC Irvine. "There’s no flu season that looks anything like New York does right now."
'Similar to flu'
Accelerated urgent care has done 5,213 COVID-19 tests at its five Bakersfield locations, Erickson said — which is more than half the 9,197 tests done so far in Kern County. Of those, 340 were positive, according to Erickson.
If that percentage of positive cases were assumed to represent the entire population of Kern County, which is roughly 900,000, it would mean about 58,000 people in Kern have had the virus, far more than the nearly 700 official confirmed, Erickson said.
That many cases would "indicate there is a widespread (COVID-19) infection, similar to flu," Erickson said.
And if we don't shutdown the country for flu, should we keep doing it for coronavirus?
"It’s about looking at trends and saying we’re not seeing what they've been talking about for the past six to eight weeks," said Massihi, referring to predictions that up to 100,000 Americans could die of the virus and hospitals would become swamped with patients. "We’ve crippled the economy. There’s a lot of domestic issues going on. Is social isolation warranted for the healthy?"
Using the same calculation, Erickson estimates 12 percent of the population statewide, or some 4.7 million Californians, have already had COVID-19. With about 1,400 deaths so far in California, that puts the statewide death rate at about .03 percent, he said.
"Does that (low death rate) necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate being out of work?" Erickson asked.
Nationwide, about 42,000 people have died of coronavirus as of Wednesday. Between 30,000 and 60,000 die of flu annually, Erickson said, citing CDC data.
The secondary effects of the shutdown are considerable, too, he said. They include a dramatic decrease in volumes at hospitals and even Erickson's urgent care practice, where staff are mostly testing patients for COVID-19 these days.
Dan Erickson, a former emergency room physician who co-owns Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield held a news conference at his Coffee Road facility to talk about data available on coronavirus and how he feels it is similar to flu.
The Californian has reported that hospital volumes are significantly decreased in recent weeks as elective surgeries have been canceled and many people are staying home for fear of contracting COVID-19, which is in turn causing financial strain for healthcare facilities. Erickson wondered what could happen when the economy reopens and people begin flooding into hospitals that have reduced their staffs.
He said local leaders and colleagues of his here and across the country are reporting increased incidents of child molestation and domestic violence while people are at home, and suicides are also spiking. He also noted a contradiction between allowing people to shop at Costco and Home Depot but not allowing them to go to church.
"If you're going to dance on someone's constitutional rights you better have a good reason, you better have a really good reason, not just a theory," he said. "The data is showing us it's time to lift (the stay-at-home orders) so if we don't lift, what is the reason?"
Noymer of UC Irvine disagreed with the doctors' premise that COVID-19 is as widespread as Erickson and Massihi think, saying the idea that nearly 5 million Californians have had the virus is a gross overestimate. The people tested in California were not a random sample; they were mostly people who were symptomatic, Noymer said. Therefore, extrapolating the positive test rate across the entire population of the state is not an accurate way to arrive at how widespread the virus is.
And even if 12 percent of the state has had the virus, that still leaves 88 percent vulnerable to it, Noymer said.
"They’re advancing factual inaccuracies and playing off the esoteric nature of the mortality stats to make a case that the economy should be reopened," Noymer said. "I agree it should be reopened, but it should be opened deliberately, bit by bit, and informed by science. Not informed by a misreading of the mortality."
But people will have different ideas on how to balance the economic costs of trying to stem the pandemic.
"Like many other things in society, we’re going to have to come to a consensus about how we allocate resources," Noymer said.
Corson said she disagreed with any assertion that we should abandon social distancing and stay-at-home orders. The county continues to adhere to Gov. Gavin Newsom's orders in order to mitigate illness and deaths from the virus and the impact it could have on the local healthcare systems, she said.
"We completely understand how eager everyone is to get back to our lives, but right now protecting our health is our number one priority and this is not the time to let up," Corson said. "I want to strongly reiterate this is the time to stay vigilant and stay at home and practice social distancing."
Big Tech is using coronavirus to increase its power - and the US is becoming more like China By Tucker Carlson
Source: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-big-tech-is-using-coronavirus-to-increase-its-power-and-the-us-is-becoming-more-like-chinaApril 29, 2020
Monday night on this show, we played you a clip from a nearly hour-long video produced by two physicians in California, Dr. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi.
Likely, many of you had already seen it. That video has had more than 5 million views on YouTube. In their presentation, the two doctors presented a flurry of data pointing to what we are currently learning about the coronavirus and how it spreads. They cited pages of government statistics and then interpreted them in light of their own long clinical experience as doctors.
At one point, they noted that the newly adjusted death rate in their state of California, which is much lower than anyone expected it to be, and they asked if government officials there should change their policies based on this new science.
Dr. Dan Erickson: We've seen 1,227 deaths in the state of California with a possible incidence or prevalence of 4.7 million. That means you have a 0.03 chance of dying from COVID-19 in the state of California.
0.03 chance of dying from COVID in the state of California -- is that -- does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work?
So, whatever your view of the mass quarantines -- and maybe you're enthusiastically for them -- the questions you just heard are valid questions. In fact, they're critical questions. We should all be asking those questions, including and especially our policymakers.
But as Dr. Erickson pointed out later in the video, dissent of any kind is no longer tolerated in this country. Fact-based honesty, which is the soul of science, is under attack, even in hospitals.
Dr. Erickson described physicians being pressured to classify illnesses and deaths as related to coronavirus, whether they believe that to be true or not.
Erickson: We aren't pressured to test for flu. But ER doctors now, my friends and I talk, saying, you know, it's interesting when I'm writing up my death report, I'm being pressured to add COVID. Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add COVID? To maybe increase the numbers and make it look a little bit worse than it is? I think so.
So, what you just heard -- what Dr. Erickson described -- is called lying, and lying has no place in science, ever. It's scary to think it takes place on a large scale in hospitals. He says it does.
Viewers of Erickson's video were shocked and transfixed by this. They forwarded the video to friends, who forwarded it on to their friends, and suddenly, millions of people who spent the last six weeks on a diet of "Tiger King" and internet memes were watching sober-minded medical researchers reading from charts of statistics. It's hard to recall a science video taking off like this one did.
Not everyone was impressed by it. Some criticized the doctors' policy conclusions, and of course, that's fair. Decent people have different opinions. We're not entirely certain what the perfect response to this pandemic is. Nobody is certain. There's no objective answer at the moment.
At best, we can plod along with open minds and good faith. More informed debate is exactly what we need to make wise decisions going forward.
Unfortunately for all of us, informed debate is exactly what the authorities don't want. They want unquestioned obedience, so they're cracking down on free expression.
Last night, the doctors' video, the one you just saw, was pulled off of YouTube, the largest video hosting site in the world. It wasn't an accident, YouTube admitted doing it. The company cited a violation of "community guidelines" and they did not apologize.
Looking back, when all of this is finally over and it will be, it's likely we'll see this moment -- what YouTube just did -- as a turning point in the way we live in this country, a sharp break with 250 years of law and custom. The two doctors' video was produced by a local television channel in California. It was, in effect, a mainstream news story.
The video was not pornographic. It didn't violate copyright or incite violence or commit libel. It didn't break any law. The only justification for taking it down was that the two physicians on-screen had reached different conclusions from the people currently in charge. It was a form of dissent from orthodoxy.
No wonder our leaders have done such a poor job protecting us from China. They're on the same team.
YouTube and its parent company, Google have now officially banned dissent. The CEO of YouTube admitted that openly.
Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube: But then we also talked about removing information that is problematic. You know, of course, anything that is medically unsubstantiated, so people saying, like, to take Vitamin C, you know, take turmeric, like those all will cure you.
Those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy. Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy. And so, remove is another really important part of our policy.
Brian Stelter, CNN chief media correspondent: So you're not just putting the truth next to the lie, you're taking the lie down. That's a pretty aggressive approach.
We're removing "anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations." It'll now be taken off the internet.
Consider that for a minute. As a matter of just science, it's ludicrous. Like everyone else involved in global pandemic policy, the WHO has often been wrong in its recommendations. A lot of people have.
In mid-January, WHO told us that coronavirus could not spread from person-to-person. In March, they told us that face masks didn't work. Those were lies, and they were welcome on Google's platforms.
Doctors who are actually treating patients with the virus, meanwhile, have just been banned. So, no, this is not about science. Censorship never is about science. It's about power. Big Technology companies are using this tragedy to increase their power over the American population. They're working in concert with politicians in order to do it.
Just on Tuesday, Facebook removed an events page for a political protest in Michigan. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who runs that state, was no doubt pleased to see it.
Grossly mismanaging an entire state is a lot easier when citizens are not allowed to complain about it, and now they're not. Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained that protests like these are no longer protected political speech; they are "misinformation."
As we fight this virus, we are becoming far more like the country that spawned it. We're becoming more like China. It's horrifying. And it tells you everything that our professional class enthusiastically welcomes this.
George Stephanopoulos, ABC News host: How do you deal with the fact that Facebook is now being used to organize a lot of these protests to defy social distancing, defy the social distancing guidelines in states? If somebody is trying to organize something like that, that qualifies as harmful information.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook: We do classify that as harmful misinformation, and we take that down.
"Harmful misinformation" -- that is a phrase familiar to anyone who has watched totalitarian regimes in any country. It's now how Mark Zuckerberg describes political opinions he doesn't like.
Our free press exists to push back against obvious abuses of power like this one. It's the reason we have a First Amendment. It's the only reason we have a First Amendment.
But suddenly our media are not concerned about freedom of speech. Reporters applaud our overlords as they punish us for disagreeing. You just saw it in that clip from CNN. That happens every day.
Our media are no longer challenging power, they are colluding with power. And that may be why there's been so little critical coverage of the massive expansion of our surveillance state currently in progress.
In the name of fighting the coronavirus, tech companies are now following you through your cell phone. They're watching you from above with drones. Those sound like paranoid fantasies; they are not. It's happening as we speak.
Needless to say, our politicians approve of this.
Andrea Mitchell, NBC News chief foreign affairs and senior Washington correspondent: How do you feel about the drones?
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.: Look, at this point, we need to save lives and it's really important that in public spaces, people are abiding by the directives.
Yes, we've got to do it.
So, what do we have here? We have Big Tech companies partnering with the government to spy on you without your knowledge. Americans locked in their homes, banned from going to church, placated with sedatives, like weed and beer.
Anyone who speaks up is silenced. Political demonstrations are illegal. Organizers are arrested. Only opinions approved by leaders, many of them unelected, are allowed on information platforms.
Does that sound familiar? It sounds a lot like China.
Of all the many ironies of this moment, so many of them bitter, the hardest to swallow is this one. As we fight this virus, we are becoming far more like the country that spawned it. We're becoming more like China. It's horrifying. And it tells you everything that our professional class enthusiastically welcomes this.
Over the weekend, The Atlantic magazine published an article by two academics calling for an end to freedom of speech in America. Their model for an ideal system? The totalitarian government of China. "In the debate over freedom versus control of the internet, China was largely correct and the U.S. was wrong."
You ought to read the whole thing. Truly, you should. It's the future. We could quote from it for the rest of the show, but we'll give you just one more: "Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with society's norms and values."
"Norms and values." Whose norms and values? Well, our leaders' norms and values, of course, but mostly their interests. Those in power are the ones our professional class seeks to protect, not the rest of the country.
Freedom of conscience never endangers the public. It only threatens the powerful. It endangers their control. It hinders their ability to dictate election results, to loot the economy, to make policies based on whim for their own gain.
No wonder our leaders have done such a poor job protecting us from China. They're on the same team.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on April 28, 2020.
Local doctors spark widespread debate over virus's death rate, when to reopen By Stacey Shepard
Source: https://www.bakersfield.com/news/local-doctors-spark-widespread-debate-over-viruss-death-rate-when-to-reopen/article_8f4dd16c-89ab-11ea-bbbb-cf8892ab1014.htmlApril 29, 2020
A call by two Bakersfield doctors to reopen the economy and lift social distancing orders caught fire on social media in recent days, drawing a tweet of support from Elon Musk and landing the doctors appearances on Fox News. But their assertions also have drawn strong rebukes from medical and health professionals, and censorship on YouTube.
“These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19,” the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine said in a joint statement issued Monday. “As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”
In response, one of the doctors, Dan Erickson, of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, said in a statement issued Tuesday: “We are not interested in bickering with medical institutions. Accelerated is focused on solutions and caring for our patients with the highest level of compassion and integrity. Accelerated has been a leader in giving testing results to Kern County to help treat and manage Covid 19 illness."
Erickson and Artin Massihi, both licensed California physicians and co-owners of the urgent care practice in Bakersfield, called a news conference last week where they cited their own testing data and state and national figures to argue that the coronavirus is far more widespread than thought and has a low death rate, similar to flu.
The doctors were early to set up a COVID-19 test center in Bakersfield and have now done the majority of testing in Kern County, about 6,000 COVID-19 tests out of more than 10,000 total tests. They report more than 400 positive results out of a total of 856 confirmed cases as of Tuesday.
The doctors’ news conference was livestreamed by local television stations and the video has been viewed millions of times on YouTube and shared widely on social media, attracting both support and criticism.
Local station KERO-TV 23 said Monday that YouTube had removed a video the station posted of the doctors' news conference last week.
A statement from YouTube on KERO's website Tuesday read: “We quickly remove flagged content that violate (sic) our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy (sic) authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance. However, content that provides sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic (EDSA) context is allowed — for example, news coverage of this interview with additional context.”
At issue are both the validity of the doctors’ statistical calculations used to arrive at the low death rate and their conclusion that social distancing and the shutdown order are no longer necessary.
Carl T. Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, said on Twitter that the doctors' calculations were not statistically sound and likened it to "estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court."
Erickson said he arrived at his conclusion about the low death rate by assuming the percentage of positive COVID-19 tests is representative of infection among the general population. In one example last week, he used California’s 12 percent positive test rate to extrapolate that as many as 5 million Californians have had the virus (5 million is 12 percent of the state's population of 40 million). He then calculated a death rate using the number of reported deaths in California — around 1,200 last week — out of the 5 million people who he believes have likely had the virus, coming out with a 0.03 percent death rate, which is similar to the death rate for flu.
"Millions of cases, small amount of death," Erickson said repeatedly in the news conference.
However, that analysis has been called incorrect because of sampling bias, according to UC Irvine associate public health professor Andrew Noymer. Because most people seeking tests for COVID-19 likely had symptoms, the infection rate among those tested will be much higher than among the general population.
Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in rural Michigan and executive director of the Committee to Protect Medicare, called the doctors’ analysis a “ridiculous ‘napkin math’ statistics note.”
In a video posted to Twitter, Davidson said: “Let’s be clear, these gentlemen have nothing to add to the discussion on when we open up and how we open up. We need a national testing strategy. We need to test a million people a day. Then we can safely open up when we see numbers going down for at least two weeks.”
He added, “I’m hoping these guys are done, their 15 minutes of fame are done.”
On “The Ingraham Angle” with Laura Ingraham on Fox News Monday night, Erickson seemed to temper his message somewhat. He did not mention statistical calculations except to say that the positive rate in Kern County based on tests at his center was about 6 percent, which was in line with recent studies out of the University of Southern California and Stanford University suggesting the rate among the general population in those areas was perhaps as much as 4 percent to 5 percent. However, those studies also have drawn criticism.
Asked by Ingraham why he thought their message had attracted so much attention, Massihi said: “There’s folks that are at home, they don’t have a job, they’ve lost their income ... I think folks feel we understand them and we do. We’re advocates for average Americans.”
Erickson told Ingraham he had been studying the approach Sweden has taken to the coronavirus, where leaders have not imposed a lockdown, kids are still in school, and handwashing and some social distancing are recommended but not enforced. Yet the virus has not raged out of control, Erickson said, then suggesting that could be tried in Kern County.
“Our approach would be to take Kern County, get the school systems going and see how the disease progresses,” he said. “Move slowly, open up the restaurants, see how it progresses. Kind of a stepwise approach down the ladder to get us back to open up the country.”
A tweet from the account for Accelerated Urgent Care Tuesday said Erickson would appear again Tuesday night on Fox News @ Night at 8 p.m. with Shannon Bream.
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