Thread by @Loretta_Torrago

Covid minimizers, like @drlucymcbride, are like eclipses that cover astronomical objects. The disaster behind their obfuscations is still there despite the cover of misleading and often irrelevant “good cheer” they try to throw in front of it. 🧵
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Implying the well-off and protected have nothing to fear because hospitals are only filling up “in states with where low vaccination rates” may reassure the privileged McBride seems most concerned with.

However, it belies the actual evidence.

McBride herself may feel protected enough to believe “the evidence calls for prudence, not panic”.

However, this ignores that much of the world is unvaccinated & that the US is stagnating at ~50% vaccination. This creates a crisis for many including the 3% of immunocompromised Americans who simply can’t get vaccinated but are surrounded by both Covid & the unvaccinated.

And while McBride herself thinks the evidence calls for "prudence", I'd at least think it called for a renewed sense of urgency and the application of "the precautionary principle".

Expressing something like nostalgia for the halcyon days when “kids enjoyed indirect protect from Covid” due to adult vaccination,

I hope you’ll excuse me if I missed that moment distracted as I was by data out of the more heavily vaxxed UK, that showed clearly this wasn’t going to happen.

Sure we might say, “So far the Delta variant isn’t thought to be more lethal” but whose thoughts are those exactly?

Because pediatricians are certainly sounding the alarm about Delta. Here is Dr. Klien in the US.

Warnings are also coming from Brazil.
cnn.com/2021/06/30/ame…

And a study from Scotland warns of increased lethality across all age groups.
thelancet.com/journals/lance…

Likewise, though anecdotal, certainly there is no shortage of MDs whose “thought” clearly is that Delta is more lethal. washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08…

McBride, at least, is willing to concede Delta is more contagious.

What is vexing, however, is her unwillingness to recognize that increased contagiousness is a kind of increased lethality.

Not just because in absolute numbers there are more lethal effects, but because, when hospitals are overwhelmed because more kids are sick, the situation is more lethal for everyone.

washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08…

Maybe I’m missing something but “Delta doesn’t seem to specifically target kids” might have superficial reassurance.

But honestly, if an asteroid is heading towards the earth, are we supposed to be consoled by the fact that asteroids don’t “seem to specifically target kids”?

Like deniers and Covid minimizers before her, McBride prefers to focus on “small” hospitalization rates.

But the math here is not hard. A naive population being hospitalized at a 1% rate will absolutely crush hospitals.

Predictably, McBride points to low transmission rates amongst kids.

Usually, these low rates are the result of studies that restricted themselves to symptomatic infections. And though the study she points to does include asymptomatic testing, it doesn’t include data from Delta.

Because that is what she’s doing, McBride is quick to tell us she’s doesn’t dismiss the risk to kids.

But adding a perspective, that doesn’t at all change absolute numbers, but merely our perception of them, is exactly how deniers “dismiss risk”.

@jhowardbrain has written an important piece on this.
sciencebasedmedicine.org/cognitive-illu…

More reassurance from McBride, concerning Long Covid in kids, comes from numbers that are not reassuring at all.

Calling a 4.4 % rate of symptoms beyond roughly a month and a 1.8% rate beyond 56 days is a use of “rare” so far removed from its actual definition that even drug manufactures are forced to call symptoms that occur at equivalent rates “common”.

But none of this is scary for McBride. If anything, the source of our fear, is not reality but the messaging out of CDC as documented in the WaPo article McBride links to.

Admittedly, the CDC might not be helping, but, aside from its handling of the Provincetown breakthrough cases, the article implicates the CDC for moving too slowly, not for stoking panic.

Interestingly, The WaPo article McBride cites also faults the CDC for being too optimistic, something McBride conveniently leaves out perhaps because it suits both her “fear is the problem” and her anti-mask message.

In closing, McBride moves on to an unrealistic picture in which emotions are ideally unhinged from reality.

In McBride’s telling, we’d all be better off if only we could be calmer about Covid and overflowing hospitals and the threat they pose to simple things like broken legs.

While McBride & the "hope" crowd insist on the acceptance of “acceptable risk” they seem blind to the problem that accepting the risk is exactly what has prolonged the pandemic. There are too many people accepting a risk they could prevent by wearing a mask & getting vaxxed.

Giving people false reassurance, as if a calmer pandemic is a better pandemic, is a squandered opportunity to take Covid risk seriously so that, for all our mental health, we can focus on the way out (NPIs and vaccination).

Instead, McBride and the other "Hopers" seem hell bent on providing rosy justifications for the selfish need to indulge oneself despite a highly contagious pandemic.