Dr. Phil McGraw isn’t an epidemiologist or a coronavirus expert. He just takes place to play one on Fox News
On Thursday night, McGraw appeared on Fox News to share his distaste with the shutdowns intended to stop the spread of coronavirus and erroneously compared the deaths attributed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, to other causes of death.
” Forty-five thousand people a year pass away from auto accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from pool,” McGraw told host Laura Ingraham, “but we do not shut the nation down for that. But yet we’re doing it for this?”
( McGraw had a vertical on HuffPost for a period of time.
Dr. Christopher Gill, a contagious illness expert and associate teacher of worldwide health at Boston University, called McGraw’s argument both “silly” and “shortsighted and unhelpful.”
” In the US, [COVID-19] case numbers are doubling weekly or so– in some parts of the nation, they are doubling every couple of days,” he told HuffPost via e-mail. “Dr. Phil appears to be arguing that we ought to do nothing up until things get so devastating that there are more [COVID-19] deaths than cigarette smoking deaths.”
” This argument makes no sense to me,” Gill continued. “The number of smoking deaths (or swimming pool deaths) is slowly falling in the U.S. due to aggressive public health projects around smoking cessation and swimming safety.
” If we were to take Dr. Phil’s guidance and do nothing because the [COVID-19] deaths UP UNTIL NOW are much smaller than the cigarette smoking deaths, then the math is quite clear that before too long the [COVID-19] deaths could really be much higher than cigarette smoking deaths, which would be disastrous,” Gill said.
Dr. Arnold Monto, a public health professor at the University of Michigan, also disagreed with McGraw’s “analysis” of the existing situation.
” This is a transmittable disease and when it occurs, there are several cases in a minimal geographic location. Handling them extends the system,” Monto discussed in an e-mail to HuffPost. “If this resembled a local catastrophe, such as a significant explosion, it would be limited to a single place. He