Covid Calculations – It’s Tough

Given the COVID-19 pandemic it’s difficult to know what one should do about so many things, including what activities are safe, what precautions one should take to avoid getting infected, what to do with investments, and whether one should send their kids to school.

As a physician I often give advice to my patients regarding coronavirus. Unfortunately the current administration has politicized the coronavirus pandemic and provided inaccurate and inconsistent messages. They denied it was a problem for a long time, and even now discourage a large number of people from wearing masks.

Besides giving out false information from the very top, they’ve had a corrupting influence on our institutions that deal with this pandemic, affecting our ability to deal with it.

For example, with very short notice hospitals were directed to stop sending hospitalization information to the CDC, and instead send it to the Department of Health and Human Services, only to later reverse course because the data was not being processed correctly.

The Centers of Disease Control (CDC) is world renowned has has trained scientists around the world. They now have to run pandemic related news through the White House and have made many changes and removed documents off their web site due to political considerations. Recently they changed their recommendation to stop testing asymptomatic patents, prompting two scientists, one of which had won a Nobel Prize and was director of the National Institute of Health, to say that we should ignore that advice.

A week after President Trump publicly pressured the FDA to approve a vaccine, the head of the FDA said he might approve a vaccine, in certain circumstances, before Phase 3 research was done. These are the experiments that show that something is safe and effective. The name of the federal government’s program to develop a vaccine, Operation Warp Speed, and the frequent predictions by government officials that we would have a vaccine this year, suggests that they may be willing to cut corners. We should proceed as fast as possible, but it should be based on solid scientific principals and consensus. Even if the decision is made to give up some safety and assurance of a vaccine working because of concerns about the economy, it should be a conscious decision and not pretending the science is something it’s not. We already have a big problem with people distrusting vaccines in general. If an approved vaccine has unexpected problems, it could keep people getting many vaccines for a long time.

President Trump has touted other treatments, including hydroxychloroquine, bleach, and plasma. The FDA just approved emergency use of plasma, despite not having good evidence yet. That will make it harder to recruit patients into research studies, where they might get a placebo, making it all the harder to find out if it’s really effective. Although some of things might have merit, these are things that should be done based on science, and a leader with no medical or scientific background has no business touting unproven treatments.

Recently Dr. Scott Atlas has the ear of the president. He has questioned the use of masks and suggested we encourage infections to get herd immunity. We’re not even sure yet if being infected confers long term immunity, but even if it does, assuming it takes 65% of the population to become infected, and 1% of those infected dies, that means we’d have over 2 million deaths in this country. Dr. Atlas is not an infectious disease specialist or epidemiologist. He is a radiologist who specializes in MRIs. But his qualification, from the White House perspective, is that he has appeared on Fox News multiple times, and it resonates with what they want to hear.

My patients trust usually trust my advice, but if I have to question what the FDA, CDC, and other government bodies tell us, it’s harder for me to give good advice.