Skip to main content

This is Why we Don't Believe Experts or the Media

Photo from Pexels.

Worst Surge Ever

That's the warning over at our local Fox affiliate. After quoting doctors warning about surge upon surge and massive ramifications and not enough beds in the city, the article quotes Dr. Paul Calkins, the Associate Chief Medical Executive at IU Health:

“There may be a few people alive that saw the flu kill millions of people in 1918 but other than those people nobody has ever seen anything like this before,” Dr. Calkins said.

Oh really. Hospitalizations (both with and because of COVID) are surging, but deaths are not. 

From https://www.coronavirus.in.gov/

To be charitable, maybe he's talking about the COVID pandemic in general and he was quoted out of context. But the article, with the headline about the WORST SURGE EVER (referring to Community Health's contingency plans) makes it sound like the pandemic is worse than ever right now. But anybody who goes to the state's coronavirus website can see that's a wild exaggeration. 

Regenstrief Institute Exaggerates Unvaccinated Deaths, Hospitalizations

The same article quotes Dr. Shaun Grannis, VP of Data and Analytics at the Regenstrief Institute, which runs Indiana's hospital dashboard. 

“99 percent of all hospitalizations are among unvaccinated individuals. 99 percent of all deaths related to COVID-19 are among unvaccinated individuals.”

Fact check: false. I've been keeping track of breakthroughs, since state dashboards make it otherwise impossible to tell what portion of the sick, the dead and the hospitalized they account for. In fact, breakthroughs have made up 19% to 39% of deaths per week over the past few months. They've made up 4% to 10% of hospitalizations and up to 36% of cases. 

Based on data from Indiana state and Regenstrief dashboards. Click to enlarge. 

My chart uses basic record-keeping and arithmetic, which a fifth grader should be able to do--let alone a vice president of data and analytics with a Dr. in front of his name. He's apparently a real Dr., not a doctor of funk--but a doctor of junk. 

Grannis was one of the authors of a study that purportedly showed vaccines prevented COVID reinfection better than recovery--five times better. That's relative risk (of course) of a positive test, and it's only looking at people who ended up in the hospital. They reached this conclusion by comparing hospitalized patients with COVID-like illness--again, not any of the 99% of the population who never went to the hospital. Here's the problem: they don't take into account how many people have recovered from COVID. The ones who went to the hospital with a reinfection may (probably) represent a tiny fraction of them. Just anecdotally, how many people do you know of who've recovered but gotten reinfected--and how many who've had a breakthrough?

I've been wondering about the low portion of vaccinated patients among Indiana's hospitalized compared to England, and with the above in mind, I'm wondering even more if Regenstrief's hospital data is correct.

False statistics like the ones quoted in the Fox59 article and junk studies that don't square with common experience are either deliberately misleading or show an astounding level of sloppiness or incompetence. Either way, when people can see they're being fed one line after another, no amount of "education" or scare stories are going to move them.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...
17 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more