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My Unpopular #covid19 Position
There is lots of info being disseminated to the lay public and amongst the medical community, social media, & the mainstream media. As as a scientist & a Physician I’ve got to call it out. 1/x
There is lots of info being disseminated to the lay public and amongst the medical community, social media, & the mainstream media. As as a scientist & a Physician I’ve got to call it out. 1/x
COVID infection doesn’t always equal COVID illness.
PPE (specifically N95 respirators have no advantage over medical masks for preventing influenza transmission among health care workers based on a RCT in JAMA). 2/x
PPE (specifically N95 respirators have no advantage over medical masks for preventing influenza transmission among health care workers based on a RCT in JAMA). 2/x
Why are we mass testing for asymptomatic patients? This is not something we do in Medicine. Why would COVID be any different? Are we going to start asymptomatic testing in Influenza and EBV going forward? Is this a cost-effective strategy? 3/x
Is it on the patient’s chart forever? Are they in isolation for every hospitalization? Does it become a pre-exisiting illness? How does that affect getting future health and life insurance? 4/x
Why is serial testing for COVID occurring in the hospital? In other words, testing over and over again until a positive test returns. That could mean a couple of things. First, it could reflect the limitations of the test and its false negative rate. 5/x
Second, it could reflect someone who is truly negative but becomes positive when thrown in the “hot zone” due to nosocomial exposure. Mass testing in the wild, not for research purposes, as a means of patient decision making is a slippery slope. 6/x
Antibody testing for COVID has been proposed which is ridiculous. Antibodies don’t infer immunity but merely exposure and an immune response. It doesn’t mean a human won’t become infected again. 7/x
Furthermore, in regards to Influenza, the CDC does not recommend antibody testing for clinical decision making and patient management. It’s merely for research. So help me understand why would COVID be different? 8/x
In conclusion, the clinical utility of a test is only as reliable as the pretest probability. This statement is applicable to any diagnostic testing. 9/x
The only people who are going to benefit from the mass PPE use & diagnostic testing are the companies that make them. In my opinion, they're likely sitting in their penthouses laughing their asses off at how much money they're going to make in the future off this pandemic. End
