They worn scrubs. They sounded clinical. And the message from two Bakersfield medical professionals was precisely what many stuck-at-home Americans wished to hear: COVID-19 is no even worse than influenza, its death rates are low and we must all go back to work and school.
Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who own urgent care centers in the region, had actually called a press conference this month to release their conclusions about the results of 5,213 COVID-19 tests they had conducted at their centers and testing site. They declared the outcomes showed that the virus had spread further in the location, unnoticed, and therefore wasn’t all that dangerous.
However public health professionals fasted to debunk the medical professionals’ findings as misguided and filled with analytical errors– and an example of the type of deceiving details they are required to lose valuable time disputing.
The doctors should never have actually assumed that the clients they tested– who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who looked for urgent look after signs they experienced in the middle of a pandemic– are representative of the basic population, stated Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious illness modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “approximating the average height of Americans from the gamers on an NBA court.” And most reputable studies of COVID-19 death rates, in reality, are far greater than the ones the medical professionals presented.
” They have actually utilized methods that are ridiculous to get outcomes that are totally implausible,” Bergstrom stated.
Still, the early media coverage went viral. A regional television report on the Bakersfield physicians’ interview garnered more than 4.3 million views on YouTube. Elon Musk, the Tesla founder who wished to reopen his Fremont manufacturing plant lastweek, praised the medical professionals to his 33 million-plus Twitter follow