All in Health Care

Are children the new Covid victims? Hardly.

Are children the new Covid victims? Hardly.

Tatiana Prophet
Covid-19, Health Care

Major news articles this week have sounded the alarm this morning that small children are flooding the ICUs around the country. Louisiana is in dire straits, with 39 confirmed Covid pediatric hospitalizations across the entire state — wait a minute, really?

By Tatiana Prophet

Last Monday morning, ABC News, NPR and numerous other elite-friendly outlets hit us hard with their lead story: Children with Covid are being admitted to the ICU in droves. But if you look closely, the ABC7 article put out numbers of cases only, and not hospitalizations.

And where the anecdotal stories pierced us in the ribs, they pivot to numbers that don’t apply to the original anecdote.

Take this New York Times article, “The Delta Variant Is Sending More Children to the Hospital. Are They Sicker, Too?” The “lede” is a soft one, the kind that begins with someone’s name, signaling this will be an intimate look. They focus on Sophia Gomez, a healthy 12-year-old who got Covid-19 and developed pneumonia, whereupon she was hospitalized (she is home now). Pneumonia is a common progression of the disease. It merely means an infection of the air sacs in the lungs (i.e. the lower respiratory tract). In terms of Covid, it can occur in the vulnerable, or in healthy people if it is not treated early. In fact wh,en we first heard about the novel coronavirus, global health authorities referred to it as atypical pneumonia.

It turns out that the Times article does not answer its own question whether the Delta variant is making children sicker; and like most articles on Covid, the experts quoted always say the same thing: Covid is spreading, people are dying, and it’s the fault of the unvaccinated. Many of those experts also have conflicts of interest.

Media use the death of Tanzania's president to reinforce Covid approach

Media use the death of Tanzania's president to reinforce Covid approach

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

OPINION:
If the reports of crowded Tanzania hospitals and a rise in funerals are in any way like those in California, then perhaps some more digging would be necessary.

Either way, at this point we can merely conclude that in addition to heart disease, President Magufuli died of pneumonia, influenza, or Covid, which the CDC groups together when testing has not been performed. Most people are unaware that not all Covid-involved deaths in the United States are determined from laboratory tests — for a variety of reasons. Each state (and hospital) varies in budget and authorization, so the CDC groups these uncertain deaths together under PIC: pneumonia-like, influenza-like and Covid-like.

For the week ending March 13, 2021 since the start of the pandemic, the CDC labeled more total deaths as due to pneumonia, influenza OR Covid-19 (725,000+) than total number of Covid-related deaths (520,000+).

It takes a while to digest that information because it’s not definitive information. There’s uncertainty baked in.

The biggest problem with the latest Covid stats

The biggest problem with the latest Covid stats

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

By TATIANA PROPHET

Many people are sharing on social media some charts showing a massive step up in cases in the United States, proclaiming doomsday. Some media are even calling this “America’s Chernobyl.”

Except there’s one thing missing: America has tested more people for SARS-Cov-2 than any other country (except apparently China — a relatively new data point). Sure, it’s easy to discount the massive testing numbers because President Trump is the one who said it; but the data bears it out.

Yahoo! News notices a minor change in wording on CDC site and it dominates the news cycle

Yahoo! News notices a minor change in wording on CDC site and it dominates the news cycle

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

STAFF REPORTS

Two days ago, Yahoo!News put out a scoop. It seemed the CDC had back-pedaled in their guidelines about how SARS-CoV-2 spreads. The story was technically accurate, but rather than uncovering a shift in policy, the change appears to be a simple reshuffling of the same sentence regarding surfaces (this is the current link) and placing “contaminated surfaces and objects” solidly under a subject header “The virus does not spread easily in other ways.”

Back to Facts examined the Internet Wayback Machine and found the page version when it was first generated on sometime in late February or early March. The wording about contaminated surfaces and objects is identical, but it was placed under the main headline “How Covid-19 spreads” and certainly looked like a more ominous, highlighted factoid.

FOX News and Lifezette predictably put the CDC in as bad a light as possible, stating now you might not have to wipe down your groceries, which actually might not be a bad idea considering that many people found this a tough task to do every day. Most of the articles, including the Washington Post, quoted experts as stating it was concerning that CDC made this change, and others stating that as long as you wash your hands after touching something, you should be safe from contracting the virus.

Incomplete facts: Washington Post says anti-malaria drug increasingly linked to deaths, omitting available screening protocols

Incomplete facts: Washington Post says anti-malaria drug increasingly linked to deaths, omitting available screening protocols

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

Friday May 15, 2020.

The Washington Post, always on the lookout to protect your health, published a pre-emptive strike against anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, citing as the news hook “a growing cache of data linking the anti-malaria drug to serious cardiac problems.” (Oddly, they must have expected Trump to “tout” the drug at least one more time, and he did not disappoint, announcing to a gobsmacked press corps on Monday May 18 that he himself had been taking the drug under the guidance of the White House doctor, for a week and a half as a preventive measure).

Read the article here: Drug promoted by Trump as coronavirus ‘game changer’ increasingly linked to deaths

Alarmed by this growing data cache, “some drug safety experts are now calling for even more forceful action by the government to discourage its use,” the authors wrote. Several have called for the FDA to revoke its emergency use authorization, given hydroxychloroquine’s documented risks.” The first forceful action was when the FDA on April 30 warned against use of the drug outside a hospital setting due to the potential for cardiac problems.

That warning came on the heels of a study from the Veterans Administration hospital that was widely publicized by multiple media outlets. The study was observational and not double-blinded, randomized or controlled as the medical community has been calling for. And it was retrospective, meaning it looked at records after resolution of a patient’s case.

Legacy media finally catches up: Covid patients are oxygen-starved and do poorly on ventilators

Legacy media finally catches up: Covid patients are oxygen-starved and do poorly on ventilators

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

By TATIANA PROPHET

Doctors at Providence Hospital in Seattle observed that the very first known U.S. patient to have Covid-19 was suffering from a lack of oxygen. That was back in January 2020.

The unnamed patient, who reported to urgent care after four days of fever and a dry cough, was tested due to having just returned from Wuhan, China. After testing positive for 2019-nCoV, he was hospitalized on January 21 in an isolation room.

At first, his blood-oxygen saturation levels were within the normal 96%-98% range, and he did not have shortness of breath, but did have a cough and two days of nausea and vomiting, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. A chest x-ray on day 3 showed no abnormalities.

Patient zero was never put on a ventilator; instead, his doctors noted growing evidence of pneumonia couple with low blood-oxygen saturation rates. He received supplemental oxygen, two kinds of antibiotics for a possible hospital-derived infection — and experimental drug Remdesivir for compassionate use.

Politifact: Test kit refusal by U.S. rated false

Politifact: Test kit refusal by U.S. rated false

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

Victoria Knight and Jon Greenberg, PolitiFact

During Sunday night’s debate, while leveling criticism at President Donald Trump’s handling of the national response to the coronavirus pandemic, former Vice President Joe Biden said the Trump administration refused to get coronavirus testing kits from the World Health Organization.</p><p>“Look, the World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them. We did not want to get them from them. We wanted to make sure we had our own,” Biden said.