A friend of mine called me on Sunday to share some research he’d done on the CDC website. He’d somehow come to the conclusion, based on several charts dealing with influenza and COVID-19, that the pandemic danger in the US had essentially come to an end by the middle of April.
I looked at the very same charts and came to a very different conclusion.
I believe we are both reasonably intelligent people. Why did we come to different conclusions, looking at exactly the same graphs?
This editorial has been sharing some quotes from an August 4 essay, “How Bad is COVID Really? (A Swedish doctor’s perspective)”, posted online by a young physician named Sebastian Rushworth, who practices in Stockholm. His essay has been shared on numerous other websites, to judge by a recent Google search. From what I can tell, the majority of the website that have shared Dr. Rushworth’s essay fall into the category of: “This supposed pandemic and economic shutdown has been a conspiracy to [take your choice: install a socialist government; boost the profits of the pharmaceutical industry; reduce the chances that Donald Trump will be re-elected; covertly insert microchips into our bodies during the vaccination process; put an end to American political and economic dominance; other insidious purposes; all of the above.]”
We shared, previously, Dr. Rushworth’s short bio, which does not suggest he subscribes to any of the conspiracies just mentioned.
I am a practicing physician in Stockholm, Sweden. Every day I get asked questions by my patients about health, diet, exercise, supplements, and medications. There is a lot of misinformation on the internet and it is easy to get the wrong advice, and hard to tell what is right and what is wrong if you don’t have advanced scientific training. The purpose of this blog is to share what the science actually says.
But Dr. Rushworth’s essay was not, in fact, scientific. It is, in fact, entirely anecdotal, as he himself states in the first sentence of his essay.
Ok, I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdotal and based on my experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, Sweden, and of living as a citizen in Sweden…
The good doctor’s anecdotal conclusion: that the pandemic is essentially finished in Sweden, and the final death rate among those who were infected by COVID will turn out to be about 0.12. The same as “regular old influenza…”
Those of us who do not have advanced scientific training are, however, equally qualified to share anecdotal stories. Anyone can share an anecdote. Or a series of anecdotes.
Plus, a properly arranged series of anecdotes can easily appear to be ‘scientific’.
Here in Pagosa Springs, we are served by a public health agency called San Juan Basin Public Health. The agency has been around for about 70 years, but the people working there have never seen anything quite like the COVID pandemic. As a result, they’ve been dealt a good deal of criticism from both extremes of the political spectrum. We recently found out that two of the three Archuleta County Commissioners want to explore the idea of ending our community’s relationship with SJBPH, in the midst of the current health crisis. You can read about that issue here.
SJBPH has been posting limited COVID data on a website dashboard, and although the information is basically anecdotal, some of us have been paying attention to it.
Although this information appears to be scientific, I consider it to be anecdotal for several reasons. First, we still don’t know if the tests are accurately measuring infections by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Second, the data comes from various sources that may, or may not, be reliable. Third, many people are asymptomatic or simply think they have the common cold. Fourth, some people are avoiding hospitals and testing facilities like the plague, and choosing to self-treat.
The chart is additionally anecdotal because I am sharing it with you in a Daily Post editorial, without being able to vouch for any of the information.
And speaking of testing, here’s another chart from the SJBPH website.
To quickly summarize all this anecdotal information: it would appear that the death rate in Archuleta County, among those who’ve been officially diagnosed with COVID, is 0.00%.
Dr. Rushworth is predicting, anecdotally, a much higher death rate for infected people in Sweden: 0.12%.
We have other powerful anecdotal sources at our disposal. Wikipedia, for example, has a web page, here, that shares anecdotal data as reported by Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. When I visited the page, it had been updated to August 13, 2020.
The death rate, for people who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 — the disease allegedly caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus — varies dramatically across the globe. The death rate in Belgium, for example, is 13.1%. That’s 100 times higher than the rate suggested by Dr. Rushworth for the country of Sweden. Johns Hopkins, however, calculates the death rate for Sweden at 6.9%, and the death rate for diagnosed cases in the US as 3.2%.
As I said, the death rate, per diagnosed case, varies. The rate in Nepal is 0.4%, (91 deaths among 24,000 cases) and in Singapore, the rate is given as 0.0% (27 deaths among 55,000 cases.)
The death rates per capita show even more dramatic differences. The per capita death rate in Belgium is 87 fatalities per 100,000 (9,900 COVID deaths in a population 11.5 million.) But the rate in Vietnam is 0.02 fatalities per 100,000 (18 COVID deaths in a population of 97.1 million.) That means the per capita death rate in Belgium is 4,000 times the rate in Vietnam.
We cannot hope, at this point in time, to claim that we understand the SARS-CoV-2 virus in any meaningful “scientific” manner… when all we have, really, is a bunch of anecdotes from different people living in different countries.
That doesn’t prevent us — humans that we are — from arrogantly claiming to know what’s going on.