1/ Sunday night rant: I thought I’d take a moment to share my “ #COVID breaking point”. A couple months ago, I was talking on the phone with a close family member when she brought up how she was anxious to go to the doctor to get her skin cancer spot checked.

2/ She’d been dealing with it for a while, and I know she had been using chemotherapy cream, so hopefully it was under control. The fear of COVID, however, was giving her pause to go to her check up. My family and I pleaded for her to go and finally she agreed.

3/ All was good (thank God) but it made me wonder - how many more people are out there like this? Who is so afraid of COVID, they are putting off cancer diagnosis and treatment? Then I saw this study. Nearly 50% decrease in cancer diagnoses. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2768946

4/ People are living in fear of something that in a vast majority of cases will not kill them, instead of being diagnosed and treated for something that easily could. Same with heart disease, diabetes, etc. - see study from Denver. Cardiac arrests way up, EMS runs way down.

5/ This is why, for those that know me I’ve become so outspoken on this issue when I usually keep to myself. I’ve worked in health care for 7 years. I see the toll obesity and cancer takes on communities around the country. These are problems that will be here long after COVID.

6/ This is why I get so angry about misleading news articles and partisans like our local Kansas City Health Department Director pushing them. They are exacerbating fear through bogus case numbers as hospitalizations are in free fall nationally, the whole point of all this...

7/ ...was to not overwhelm the health care system. They are not overwhelmed, and trends clearly show they are not threatened to be. But now we are focusing on CASES, which is the worst metric by far given the huge limitations of PCR tests discussed here https://twitter.com/tlowdon/status/1299736519184232449

8/ Yet people like @ScottGottliebMD and others infer cases are the most important metric - for example instead of showing the hospitalization trends across the country he shows cases. Cases should barely be mentioned. It should be a footnote. https://twitter.com/scottgottliebmd/status/1300051750313918465

9/ Same with deaths - “legacy death laundering” coined by @EthicalSkeptic is very real. Reported deaths =/= deaths that occurred yesterday. Death reporting in most states is opaque, but places like FL who report date of death show how far back they can go (weeks to months) https://twitter.com/ethicalskeptic/status/1298780568591761408

10/ So to recap...stop all of the fear mongering. Call out awful fear porn headlines when you see them. The people who push this narrative need to be held accountable for the amount of fear it has caused. And make sure the people you care about go to the doctor, for God’s sake.

11/11 Fear kills, while Covid-like illness ED visits continue to hit record lows. Hospitalizations falling like a rock, nearly to March levels. These are the important metrics, don’t let bureaucrat MDs tell you otherwise. Let’s end the mass panic and case obsession.