Two doctors in California whose facilities have administered more than 5,000 coronavirus tests say the virus is not more deadly than the seasonal flu, and stay-at-home orders across the country should be lifted.
Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who co-own Accelerated Urgent Care facilities in Kern County, said, “The death rate of the coronavirus is similar in prevalence to the flu,” according to ABC 23.
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“If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018, we had 50 to 60 million with the flu,” Erickson said. “And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545 — similar to the flu of 2017-2018. We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter-in-place. No shutting down businesses.”
“Do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is emphatically no,” Erickson said during a press conference last week. “Do we need businesses to be shut down? Emphatically no. Do we need to test them and get them back to work? Absolutely.”
Erickson added, “If you’re going to dance on someone’s constitutional rights you better have a good reason, you better have a really good reason, not just a theory. The data is showing us it’s time to lift (the stay-at-home orders) so if we don’t lift, what is the reason?”
Another doctor in the area, George Rutherford, disagrees.
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“What we’re trying to do is prevent people from dying, that’s what we’re trying to do in the Bay Area,” Rutherford said. “The early projections were that there would be 44,000 deaths in the Bay Area. There have been 210 so far so I think we’re doing pretty damn good and I’ve certainly don’t want to mess with that kind of success.”
The spokeswoman for Kern County Public Health Services, Michelle Corson, said the county will continue following quarantine orders from the government after she was questioned by local reporters about the doctors’ findings.
“There are top medical minds in our state, in our county, in our nation that are providing this guidance to us,” Corson said. “We concur that these are actions that we should be taking right now, and we are steadfast in our recommendation to our community to continue this. This is the health of our community that is at stake.
The American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine also came out against the doctors’ findings, saying in a statement, “These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”
The two doctors’ findings come as states across the country increase testing as part of the first phase to begin reopening local economies, including in New York, where the virus has hit residents especially hard.
“Any plan to start to reopen the economy has to be based on data and testing, and we have to make sure our antibody and diagnostic testing is up to the scale we need so we can safely get people back to work,” Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last week, adding that the testing would be done “in the most aggressive way in the nation.”
