COVID-19: California ER Doctor Explains Numbers

We really wanted to come together today and kind of just talk about what we've learned over the last couple months here at a accelerated and really talk about what's happening in Kern County with our testing, what's happening in California with the testing and kind of an ER physician entrepreneur perspective on what's going on. And kind of what we think the approach should be going forward. And Dr. Massihi and myself have been dealing with this as you have, I'm sure you guys are working from home, you're sheltering in place, you're isolating yourself and uh, we, we want to talk about it. That still makes sense. So we want to, we want to kind of take everything we've learned and throw it against the backdrop of who we are. You know, we both have had extensive classes in microbiology and biochemistry and immunology.

We've studied this for each of us 20 years and we take everything that we're seeing today and we put that against that backdrop. And say, does this make sense? Are we following the science? We keep hearing following the science, what, what is, what is science? Essentially it's the study of the natural world through experiment, through observation. So that's what we're doing. We're studying the disease around us or making observations. We're doing testing experiments to figure out exactly what's going on. And so this has caused some severe disruption for accelerated as we have people coming in seven in the morning till midnight, we're reporting to the health department or calling patients back.

And at the same time, our volumes have dropped significantly. Uh, the hospitals, their ICU are empty essentially, and they're shutting down floors. They're furloughing patients, they're furloughing doctors. So the health system has been evacuated in certain places. In New York, the health system is working at maximum capacity. In California, we're really at a minimal capacity getting rid of our doctors and nurses because we just don't have the volume. The hospitals don't. As I've met with our CEOs twice in the last week and we don't as well. So we're busy with paperwork for covid and we're all focusing on covid. And so one of the things I'd like to talk about is when I talked to ER physicians around the country, what's happening? Well because covid has become the focus, people with heart disease, people with cancer, hypertension and various things that are critical are choosing not to come in based on fear.

So what that's doing is costing the health system to focus on covid and not focus on a myriad of other things that are critical because we don't have the staff there and major, the major component is fear. People are saying, I don't want to go get seen by my doctor. What if I get the covid? So there is a lot of secondary effects to covid that aren't being talked about. And so we'd like to kind of look at how the, how we responded as a nation and why you responded. Our first initial response two months ago was a little bit of fear. We decided to shut down travel to and from China. These are good ideas when you don't have any facts. We to keep people at home and isolate them. Even though everything we've studied about quarantine, typically you quarantine the sick when someone has measles, you quarantine them.

We've never seen where we quarantine the healthy, where you take those without disease and without symptoms and lock them in your home. So some of these things, um, from what we've studied from immunology and microbiology aren't really meshing with what we know as people of scientific minds that read this stuff every day.

So that's kinda how we started. We don't know what's going on. We see this new virus, how should we respond? So we did that initially and over the last couple of months we've gained a lot of data. Uh, typically in Kern County for instance, our, we've tested 5,000, 213 people and we have 340 positive covid cases. Well that's 6.5% of the population, which would indicate that there is a widespread viral infection similar to flu. We think it's, it's kind of ubiquitous throughout California. And we're going to go over those numbers a little bit to kind of help you see how widespread covid is and see how we should be responding to it based on it's its prevalence throughout society or it's the existence of the cases that we already know about. So if you look at California, these numbers are from yesterday. We have 33,865 covid cases out of a total of 280,900 total tested.

That's 12% of Californians were positive for covid. So we don't the initial, as you guys know, the initial models were were willfully inaccurate. They predicted millions of cases of death, not of not of prevalence or incidence, but death that is not materializing. What is materializing in the state of California is 12% positives. Well, if we have 39.5 million people, if we just take a basic calculation and extrapolate that out, that equates to about 4.7 million cases throughout the state of California, which means this thing is widespread. That's the good news. We've seen 1,227 deaths in the state of California with a possible, uh, incidence or prevalence of 4.7 million. That means you have a 0.03 chance of dying from coven 19. The state of California 0.03 chance of dying from covid in the state of California. Is that, does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems?

Does that necessitate people being out of work? So that's, that's California. And that's, uh, I also wanted to mention that 96% of people in California who get covid would recover with almost no significant sequella or no significant, uh, continuing medical problems. So that's, those are important statistics for the state of California. Two months ago we didn't know this, so I'm going to bring it to light now because we've, we're, we're sharing our own data. This isn't data filtered through someone. This is our own data. We found 6.5% and then California has found 12%. So the more you test, the more positives you get, the the prevalence number goes up and the death rate stays the same. So it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And as we move through this data, what I want you to see is millions of cases, small amount of death, millions of cases, small amount of death.