I don’t know who needs to read this, but maybe the evidence of declining infections, hospitalizations, and ICU occupancy isn’t quite the marker for favorable “reopening” that any of our elected officials have held it out to be.
Instead, maybe these data are a fig leaf for doubling down on an economic system that’s as American as Mom and apple pie, but that can only run on a system of inequities that makes it unfair even in the best times and uniquely terribly suited for this time.
Another 🧵. I recall when, early in the #COVID19 pandemic, patients with #MECFS and clinicians/researchers who work with them, warned about #LongCOVID before there was time for cases to develop and thus for many folks to start to experience the syndrome. Early but prescient. 1/n
We’re now seeing hopeful reports of people who are recovering or have recovered from #LongCOVID. I want nothing more than for people to be able to walk away from the horrors of post-exertional symptoms, which I discussed in another thread. This one is about survivorship bias. 2/n
There’s a story so famous about survivorship bias that it’s on the esteemed academic website, Wikipedia. The U.S. military asked Abraham Wald to study airplanes returning from combat to determine how best to distribute armor to prevent the airplanes from being shot down. 3/n
@TomKindlon Thanks for sharing this article, Tom. Our @4WorkWell group proposed a heart rate formula in 2010 that was evaluated in the study. The threshold was intended to help people with #MECFS avoid exceeding their heart rate at ventilatory anaerobic threshold. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20185614/
@TomKindlon@4WorkWell I think it’s important to point out the equation we proposed was never intended to accurately predict heart rate at VAT. It was intended to slightly under-estimate heart rate at ventilatory anaerobic threshold. The thought was this underestimation would provide a safety margin.
@TomKindlon@4WorkWell The authors of the present study, very helpfully, provide us with some important subject-level data in Figure 1. These data can help us get an idea of whether the formula we proposed in 2010 actually underestimates the heart rate at lactic acid threshold, as originally intended.