CDC's questionable "study" — about locations to catch COVID — is still being peddled by American media and Government — as justification for discriminatory treatments of business and religion

04 December 2020

Today, I make three points — based upon just one sample of their combination

American Government health agencies are arguably not reliable sources for intelligently gathered and reported COVID-19 information.

These agencies' often scientifically vacuous hand-waving regularly gets parroted by American media, without thoughtful examination.

And US healthcare providers and staff, busy as they are, do not have the time to detect exactly how BS-oriented these Establishment reports often are.

(For more demonstrations of these combined phenomena — read a number of entries under the Medicine & Science section — located on the left side of this web page.)

Today's example — lifted from the Lamestream — Yahoo

Yesterday, Yahoo distributed an overview entitled "Almost All COVID Transmission Is Happening in These 5 Places, Doctor Says".

The doctor quoted is CNN's admirably earnest and likeable Sanjay Gupta.

Yahoo's article (and presumably Dr. Gupta) parade the "usual suspects" for COVID shunning — restaurants, bars, cafes, hotels and "houses of worship":

A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published on Sept. 11 found that "adults with positive SARS-CoV-2 test results were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant than were those with negative SARS-CoV-2 test results."

The CDC study grouped cafes in with bars and found that 8.5 percent of people who tested positive for COVID had visited these places.

They ranked staying in a hotel as very risky, second only to staying in a hostel or dormitory-style dwelling.

The CDC study found that 7.8 percent of people who tested positive for COVID had been to a house of worship.

Right off the bat — notice the discriminatory numbers

So, y'all are telling me that places with roughly an 8 percent likelihood of spreading COVID are somehow more important than the 84 to 92 percent of combined other sources?

And y'all are implying that the 8.5 precent cafe-bar group is completely distinct from the 7.8 percent church-going flock? (Ergo my above 84 — rather than 92 percent.)

The CDC study — that underlies the Yahoo-Gupta article . . .

. . . is this scientifically lax piece:

Kiva A. Fisher, Mark W. Tenforde, Leora R. Feldstein, Christopher J. Lindsell, Nathan I. Shapiro, D. Clark Files, Kevin W. Gibbs, Heidi L. Erickson, Matthew E. Prekker, Jay S. Steingrub, Matthew C. Exline, Daniel J. Henning, Jennifer G. Wilson, Samuel M. Brown, Ithan D. Peltan, Todd W. Rice, David N. Hager, Adit A. Ginde, H. Keipp Talbot, Jonathan D. Casey, Carlos G. Grijalva, Brendan Flannery, Manish M. Patel, Wesley H. Self and IVY Network Investigators and CDC COVID-19 Response Team, Community and Close Contact Exposures Associated with COVID-19 Among Symptomatic Adults ≥18 Years in 11 Outpatient Health Care Facilities — United States, July 2020, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), 69(36); 1258–1264 (11 September 2020)

Let's dive into the CDC's purported "study"

What we find will reveal characteristic Government muddle-headedness.

Let's begin by verifying Dr. Gupta's accuracy in conveying the CDC's findings.

Pay attention to the behavioral specifics that the CDC mentions. Those will be important to our analysis of this arguably contrived nonsense:

Close contact with a person with known COVID-19 was more commonly reported among case-patients (42%) than among control-participants (14%).

Case-patients were more likely to have reported dining at a restaurant . . . in the 2 weeks preceding illness onset than were control-participants (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 2.4; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.5–3.8).

Restricting the analysis to participants without known close contact with a person with confirmed COVID-19, case-patients were more likely to report dining at a restaurant (aOR = 2.8, 95% CI = 1.9–4.3) or going to a bar/coffee shop (aOR = 3.9, 95% CI = 1.5–10.1) than were control-participants.

[W]hen the analysis was restricted to the 225 participants who did not report recent close contact with a person with known COVID-19, case-patients were more likely than were control-participants to have reported dining at a restaurant (aOR = 2.8, 95% CI = 1.9–4.3) or going to a bar/coffee shop (aOR = 3.9, 95% CI = 1.5–10.1).

Among 107 participants who reported dining at a restaurant and 21 participants who reported going to a bar/coffee shop, case-patients were less likely to report observing almost all patrons at the restaurant adhering to recommendations such as wearing a mask or social distancing (p = 0.03 and p = 0.01, respectively).

© 2020 Kiva A. Fisher et al, Community and Close Contact Exposures Associated with COVID-19 Among Symptomatic Adults ≥18 Years in 11 Outpatient Health Care Facilities — United States, July 2020, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), 69(36); 1258–1264 (11 September 2020) (extracts)

Those of you with scientific or medical backgrounds may be impressed . . .

. . . by the CDC's "adjusted odds ratios" and their accompanying confidence intervals.

"Surely" — you may think — "this is a smoking gun of virus spreading."

That is until . . .

. . . we get to the part where the CDC inadvertently informs us how laughably badly the "study" was conducted:

CDC personnel administered structured interviews in English or five other languages by telephone . . . .

The final analytic sample (314) included 154 case-patients (positive SARS-CoV-2 test results) and 160 control-participants (negative SARS-CoV-2 test results).

Data collected included demographic characteristics, information on underlying chronic medical conditions, symptoms, convalescence . . . self-rated physical and mental health . . . close contact (within 6 feet for ≥15 minutes) with a person with known COVID-19, workplace exposures, mask-wearing behavior, and community activities ≤14 days before symptom onset.

Participants were asked about wearing a mask and possible community exposure activities (e.g., gatherings with ≤10 or >10 persons in a home; shopping; dining at a restaurant; going to an office setting, salon, gym, bar/coffee shop, or church/religious gathering; or using public transportation) on a five-point . . . scale ranging from “never” to “more than once per day” or “always”;

For each reported activity, participants were asked to quantify degree of adherence to recommendations such as wearing a face mask of any kind or social distancing among other persons at that location, with response options ranging from “none” to “almost all.”

Descriptive and statistical analyses were performed to compare case-patients with control-participants, assessing differences in demographic characteristics, community exposures, and close contact.

Applying skepticism's cudgel of truth

The United States has roughly 331 million people. These are scattered across a variety of terrains and climates, comprised of varying population densities and variegated cultural nuances.

The CDC is telling us — without a gram of self-doubt — that a sample of only 154 virus-infected folk is going to going to:

statistically adequately cover both

this large national population

as well as

all the numerous patient-characteristics

plus

the wide variety of public interactions that they experienced —

at widely scattered locations and types?

Consider the methodology more deeply:

Done over telephone.

Dependant upon subjects' — both ill and not — memories of things that they would not have been tuned to looking for — at the time that they did whatever they were doing.

Expecting subjects to remember precise interactional distances — across many hours — distributed among many days.

And simultaneously somehow, the study's subjects — in their at-the-time task-distracted brains — successfully recording mask-wearing proportions among groups of other people.

All this data winnowed from a study that probably, at least occasionally, suggested potential site characteristics by name — meaning "restaurant" or "bar" — so as to jog subjects' recall?

I would have significant difficulty coming up with . . .

. . . a retrospective review design that is more likely to achieve confirmation bias — and hypothesis-confirmation — than this one.

This CDC "study" is not science. It is mumbo-jumbo, camouflaged with questionably applied, precision-pretending metrics.

(God knows what went on, when the team decided how to sort and mathematically evaluate variables for statistical "proof".)

On this methodologically absurd and societally careless basis . . .

. . . the United States' small business economy is repetitively being hammered with closures and draconian reduced-capacity constraints.

The moral? — Notice how the CDC's highly questionable "study" . . .

. . . has taken flight and permeated American consciousness at all levels.

We are repetitively squashing our economy — and our public — based on Lazy Government's stubborn unwillingness to sponsor and conduct properly done science.

I am not saying that the "usual suspects" are not significant places for SARS-CoV-2 transmission. The hypothesis about food-chomping, alcohol-swilling and loudly-jabbering in closed spaces makes COVID-spreading sense.

I'm simply pointing out that no one, to my knowledge, has demonstrated this proposition in even marginally convincing fashion. Dr. Gupta's adherence to the poorly reasoned and conducted CDC study probably demonstrates that he has not either.

What does this tell you about the Unites States' scientific and epidemiological acumen?

Or about the nation's willingness to find what is true, rather than what is both convenient and saleable?

PeteFree.com

CDC's questionable "study" — about locations to catch COVID — is still being peddled by American media and Government — as justification for discriminatory treatments of business and religion