Research Update

Corrections, More Data, and a Strategic Public Approach

Since writing about preliminary results of Dr. Brian Tyson’s data, a few things have happened that are changing course in a better way.

First, I am planning a correction for computations based on filtering out nursing home patients.

Second, a reader mentioned silent hypoxics to me in an email, so I’m going to look for a way to correct for that population, too. These are the patients who might slip through a “treat everyone at the mild COVID-19 stage” filter. However, I have not yet sourced a claim of numeracy or proportion of such COVID-19 patients.

We may never be able to put together patient statistics that would allow for the best possible comparison to a synthetic control group (comorbidities, etc.), but the nursing home filter does much of that implicitly. The case is clearly still very good.

While the numbers are fairly large, even larger numbers are more convincing. There is a point at which it looks stupid to argue against the results of treating 10,000 or 50,000 or 120,000 patients with close to zero mortality. Frankly, we are far beyond “this is all stupid and we should be treating patients as early as possible” already, but it is notoriously harder to convince people they’ve been fooled than it is to fool them.

I have been made aware of what looks like 120,000 patients who received early ambulatory outpatient care through a number of sources. I have been put in touch with a number of the doctors already who are preparing their data to send to me. This is very exciting because I believe that presentation of that data will push more people over to an understanding of the true efficacy of relatively optimal early ambulatory care of COVID-19.

Then what? Publish?

The goal is to make the greatest impact—-to save the most lives and do the most to pressure a better direction for medicine. As such, my plan (our plan as Dr. Tyson seemed in total agreement, and several doctors have agreed to send in data on approximately 30,000 patients, with more to come) is to establish a website that presents the data for all to see. Certainly, publication can take place at any time. But let’s face it, when some anonymous researchers do a far better job of gathering, analyzing, presenting, and summarizing the information, but so much flimsy garbage gets promoted in even the most prestigious journals, science is in crisis and we must all simply do as we can to navigate what seems like a rocky river between an era of runaway narcissism-masking-corporate-greed and one of more thoughtful design. My hope is that data-on-the-blockchain leads to a new set of sources that can be more transparent and trustworthy.

I only wish I’d started sooner, but I was building another education company when COVID-19 came along…

In the meantime, let’s get eyeballs on the data because the conclusions are obvious.

As with Dr. Tyson’s data, I will make checks with all county or similar officials to verify the data and will make that clear on the website for anyone who wishes to check the veracity of the data.

For now, I’m off on vacation for about a week. It will be good to hike, canoe, ride horses, shoot skeet, and whatever other fun we can come up with after 15 months of staying overly stationary.