Michael Ejercito wrote:
> HeartDoc Andrew, in the Holy Spirit, boldly wrote:
>> Michael Ejercito wrote:
>>
>>> https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1fasuje/always_check_the_denominator_no_the_risk_of/
>>>
>>>
>>> Always Check the Denominator
>>> No, the risk of critical Covid disease is not 4% among healthy children.
>>>
>>> Kelley K
>>> May 30, 2024
>>>
>>> I’ve been very busy lately with my actual job and some other things, so
>>> I haven’t been writing much lately. I paused paid subscriptions for the
>>> summer to try and get caught up. I’m not taking the summer off - I plan
>>> to start writing again even while payments are paused. Hopefully you’ll
>>> be hearing more from me soon! Today seemed like a good day to start…
>>>
>>> I woke up to this outrageous claim from CIDRAP in my Twitter feed:
>>>
>>>
>>> This is not the first time that I’ve written about CIDRAP amplifying
>>> misleading claims from a Covid study to amp up fears about Covid and
>>> kids. They also misreported a study about Long Covid, claiming that 84%
>>> of Covid survivors had Long Covid symptoms 2 years later. Like that
>>> ridiculous Long Covid claim, the claim from their current tweet and
>>> article on Covid risks among kids just doesn’t pass a basic sanity
>>> check. Michael Mina did some basic math to show how absurd this claim is:
>>>
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, the reporters at CIDRAP (along with many other Covid
>>> journalists and even some scientists) seem to lack the common sense to
>>> do these kinds of sanity checks on the data — because this keeps happening.
>>>
>>> A Meta-Analysis of “Risk Factors for Pediatric Critical COVID-19”
>>> The study, “Risk Factors for Pediatric Critical COVID-19: A Systematic
>>> Review and Meta-Analysis” is primarily about which comorbidities are
>>> risk factors for severe Covid — it’s focused on severe cases and kids
>>> with comorbidities. However, the study does include the 4% claim cited
>>> by CIDRAP. I can’t access the full text of the published paper from the
>>> Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, but the study’s
>>> abstract does state: “In previously healthy children, the absolute risk
>>> of critical disease from COVID-19 was 4% (95% CI, 1%-10%).” I wanted
>>> more details of the underlying data, so I found the pre-print of the
>>> study, and the following section of the Results is where this 4%
>>> statistic comes from:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Figure 4 from the study
>>> This small section is the only mention of outcomes in children without
>>> comorbidities, and it doesn’t include nearly enough caveats about the
>>> underlying data. It is a poor conclusion to draw and shouldn’t have been
>>> included in the abstract at all in my opinion. The abstract even says
>>> that “the absolute risk for critical COVID-19 in children and
>>> adolescents without underlying health conditions is relatively low,”
>>> which doesn’t seem consistent with a 4% “absolute risk of critical
>>> disease” from their results. In reality, the absolute risk among
>>> previously healthy children is at least an order of magnitude lower than
>>> that.
>>>
>>> Underlying Study Data
>>> It should be obvious to the casual observer that the 4% was calculated
>>>from a population that doesn’t represent typical healthy children. So I
>>> looked up each of the 6 studies included in this subset of studies from
>>> the meta-analysis. Of the 6 studies that looked at medical complexity, 4
>>> were among hospitalized children (3 of the 4 in Brazil)1, one was among
>>> 12-17-year-olds with symptomatic Covid recorded in medical records2, and
>>> one was a large study of children with documented Covid in Mexico3.
>>>
>>>
>>> Outcomes for Children without Comorbidities (data extracted from Figure
>>> 4 above, population descriptions from underlying studies)
>>> Also, all of the studies were from early in the pandemic (2020 and part
>>> of 2021), so they were primarily first infections, they were primarily
>>> pre-vaccine, and all were pre-Omicron. So they don’t tell us much about
>>> the current situation, even among children who may be hospitalized with
>>> Covid in 2024.
>>>
>>> The large study in Mexico included over 130,000 children and found 0.3%
>>> of children with documented Covid infections and no comorbidities died
>>> between March 2020 and mid-June 2021. And that is still biased to more
>>> severe cases, because many asymptomatic and mild infections aren’t
>>> documented in medical records. Despite the overwhelming findings from
>>> this large study of children from the broader community (not just
>>> hospitalized children), the study authors calculated an absolute risk
>>>from a small subset of children from these 6 studies (less than 16,000
>>> patients). They don’t provide any further details the subset that they
>>> used for their calculations, but clearly the studies of hospitalized
>>> children and symptomatic teens skewed the results significantly.
>>>
>>> Denominators Matter
>>> There’s been much discussion about the importance of denominators
>>> throughout the pandemic, but scientists, journalists, and others keep
>>> making the same mistakes. When we use percentages to talk about Covid
>>> outcomes or other things, we’re talking about a fraction of the
>>> population. But it’s super important to understand WHICH population
>>> we’re talking about. Outcomes among hospitalized patients, or among the
>>> elderly, differ greatly from outcomes in the general population.
>>>
>>> Just like the percentage of adults who ride mountain bikes is much
>>> higher among attendees at a mountain biking race than among all adults,
>>> the percentage of children with critical Covid is obviously much higher
>>> among children who are hospitalized for Covid than among all children.
>>> We see this same error with Long Covid studies, where the findings are
>>> percentages among patients at a Long Covid clinic, or among patients who
>>> already have Long Covid, but are often reported as if they are
>>> percentages among a representative sample of the population.
>>>
>>> The percentage of children with critical Covid outcomes is obviously
>>> much higher among children who are hospitalized for Covid than among all
>>> children.
>>>
>>> The Sad State of Covid Science and Journalism
>>> The authors of this study were irresponsible to include the claim that
>>> “the absolute risk of critical disease from COVID-19 was 4%” among
>>> healthy children without comorbidities, without explaining that their
>>> data was heavily biased toward patients already hospitalized with COVID.
>>> Without that caveat, the 4% claim is a gross misrepresentation of the
>>> underlying data. And this study isn’t from some obscure scientist at a
>>> no-name institution — the senior author, Dr. Carlos Oliveira, is an
>>> Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Biostatistics, and Biomedical
>>> Informatics & Data Science at Yale! Surely he knows that 4% of American
>>> children didn’t have severe Covid outcomes. Why include that misleading
>>> statistic in the paper?!?
>>>
>>> I also think the writers at CIDRAP needs to do a better job of
>>> understanding and vetting the studies they report on to make sure their
>>> reporting is accurate. They are a trusted voice for many people, and
>>> their studies often get amplified by the Zero Covid crowd on Twitter. It
>>> is profoundly unhelpful to continue scaring people with these misleading
>>> and unrealistic statistics. Journalists need to understand the harm they
>>> cause by publishing these irresponsible claims.
>>>
>>> By the way… I’m already seeing this same error with H5N1 (bird flu) in
>>> the media as well, and will probably write more on that later. Many news
>>> reports refer to a 50% “fatality rate”, but that’s only among known
>>> cases that were previously documented. Among the 3 cases identified so
>>> far in the US (one in 2022 and two this year), none have died. The two
>>> known cases this year have only experienced eye infections.
>>> UPDATE: The moment I published this, I saw that another case of H5N1 has
>>> been identified in the US. That patient did have respiratory symptoms
>>> but is recovering. (5/30/24)
>>>
>>> Thanks for reading Check Your Work! Subscribe for free to receive future
>>> posts.
>>>
>>> Type your email...
>>> Subscribe
>>> 1
>>> (A) Ward JL, Harwood R, Smith C, Kenny S, Clark M, Davis PJ, et al. Risk
>>> factors for PICU admission and death among children and young people
>>> hospitalized with COVID-19 and PIMS-TS in England during the first
>>> pandemic year. Nat Med. 2022 Jan;28(1):193–200.
>>> (B) Oliveira EA, Colosimo EA, Simoes ESAC, Mak RH, Martelli DB, Silva
>>> LR, et al. Clinical characteristics and risk factors for death among
>>> hospitalised children and adolescents with COVID-19 in Brazil: an
>>> analysis of a nationwide database. Lancet Child Adolesc Health. 2021
>>> Aug;5(8):559–68.
>>> (C) Hendler JV, Miranda do Lago P, Muller GC, Santana JC, Piva JP, Daudt
>>> LE. Risk factors for severe COVID-19 infection in Brazilian children.
>>> Braz J Infect Dis. 2021 Nov-Dec;25(6):101650
>>> (D) Horta M, Ribeiro GJC, Campos NOB, de Oliveira DR, de Almeida
>>> Carvalho LM, de Castro Zocrato K, et al. ICU Admission, Invasive
>>> Mechanical Ventilation, and Mortality among Children and Adolescents
>>> Hospitalized for COVID-19 in a Private Healthcare System. Int J Pediatr.
>>> 2023;2023:1698407.
>>>
>>> 2
>>> Campbell JI, Dubois MM, Savage TJ, Hood-Pishchany MI, Sharma TS, Petty
>>> CR, et al. Comorbidities Associated with Hospitalization and Progression
>>> Among Adolescents with Symptomatic Coronavirus Disease 2019. J Pediatr.
>>> 2022 Jun;245:102–10 e2.
>>>
>>> 3
>>> Sanchez-Piedra C, Gamino-Arroyo AE, Cruz-Cruz C, Prado-Galbarro FJ.
>>> Impact of environmental and individual factors on COVID-19 mortality in
>>> children and adolescents in Mexico: An observational study. Lancet Reg
>>> Health Am. 2022 Apr;8:100184.
>>
>> In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
>> GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's
>> secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps
>> us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
>> pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
>> 100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
>> appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).
>>
>> Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
>> COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the US & elsewhere is by
>> rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given
>> moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
>> contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
>> "convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and
>> self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
>> Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
>> scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
>> Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
>> combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
>> that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
>> longer effective.
>>
>> Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry (
>> https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ
>> ) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.
>>
>> So how are you ?
>
> I am wonderfully hungry!

While wonderfully hungry in the Holy Spirit, Who causes (Deuteronomy
8:3) us to hunger, I note that you, Michael, are rapture ready (Luke
17:37 means no COVID just as eagles circling over their food have no
COVID) and pray (2 Chronicles 7:14) that our Everlasting (Isaiah 9:6)
Father in Heaven continues to give us "much more" (Luke 11:13) Holy
Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) so that we'd have much more of His Help to
always say/write that we're "wonderfully hungry" in **all** ways
including especially caring to "convince it forward" (John 15:12) with
all glory (Psalm112:1) to GOD (aka HaShem, Elohim, Abba, DEO), in
the name (John 16:23) of LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.

Laus DEO !

Source:
https://narkive.com/MSQjdLfN.8

Positive control on USENET:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/7ixdk7t6Bk8/m/xpbS2z7QAAAJ

Suggested further reading:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/5EWtT4CwCOg/m/QjNF57xRBAAJ

Shorter link:
http://bit.ly/StatCOVID-19Test

Be hungrier, which really is wonderfully healthier especially for
diabetics and other heart disease patients:

http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrew touts hunger (Luke 6:21a) with all glory
( http://bit.ly/Psalm112_1 ) to GOD, Who causes us to hunger
(Deuteronomy 8:3) when He blesses us right now (Luke 6:21a) thereby
removing the http://WDJW.great-site.net/VAT from around the heart

....because we mindfully choose to openly care with our heart,

HeartDoc Andrew <><
--
Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Cardiologist with an http://bit.ly/EternalMedicalLicense
2024 & upwards non-partisan candidate for U.S. President:
http://WonderfullyHungry.org
and author of the 2PD-OMER Approach:
http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrewCare