Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully

Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by timr on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:05PM (#25584820)

She's loose with facts, herself: consider the four links provided at the end of the sentence "I was personally distressed to watch you tell the governor of Florida, where my high-risk family members live, that COVID-19 does not present a significant threat in terms of overwhelming hospitals. This is verifiably false." That's a pretty big, specific claim. What is the evidence she is providing?

Every word in "this is verifiably false" links to a different article, only one of which provides even weak evidence that one might characterize as supporting the claim:

* Link one is to an article about San Francisco from December 10, claiming that hospitals there will run out of beds in 17 days. Florida is not mentioned (incidentally, hospital capacity in SF has increased slightly since the article was written [1]).

* Link two is to a an article about Miami-Dade from December 4, where they quote CEOs from two hospital chains, who say that they have enough beds to handle the current caseload, but "may" not have enough staff.

* Link three is about cases nationwide. It does not mention Florida.

* Link four is about a White House report from November. The article explicitly says: "The November 29 document showed a minimal change in total hospitalization from the week prior". The "evidence" here is that the document predicts a "post-Thanksgiving surge".

To my knowledge, no hospital system in Florida has been "overwhelmed" by any conventional definition of the word [2]. Florida hospitals currently appear to be well below the peak seen in July [3]. The predicted "post-thanksgiving surge" does not appear to have materialized [4].

Reasonable people can certainly disagree and debate the current level of strain on hospitals in the US, and the appropriate trade-offs in our response to these strains. However, it's not fair or intellectually honest to attack another person for weaknesses in past speculation when you are yourself engaging in speculative, possibly misleading forms of arguments.

[1] https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/Hospital-Capacity/qtdt-yqr2...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/report-patient-impact.html

[3] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/coronavirus/os-ne-coronaviru...

[4] https://covid-19.direct/state/FL

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by nhod on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:26PM (#25585028)

To be fair to her, she did not claim that hospitals in Florida specifically were at risk from being overwhelmed. Instead, she takes issue with Levitt telling the governor of Florida that COVID generally does not present a significant threat in terms of overwhelming hospitals, which is in fact verifiably false; COVID has overwhelmed hospitals all over the world multiple times. I write this from LA, where our hospitals are currently overwhelmed, and likely to get more so in the next three weeks as people return from holiday travel.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by timr on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:52PM (#25585285)

Yes, I considered this. The sentence is phrased somewhat ambiguously, which is why I said she's being loose with the facts. But the links she provides neither back up the claim (all are speculative), and 3/4 are not specific to Florida, so I think it's a fair critique given the forceful nature of the statement, and the fact that she's calling out Levitt for his own past speculation.

The link to Levitt's supposed comments to the governor is broken, so we can't verify what he actually said in detail. However, if you follow the other links, you can see that she is not above taking comments out of context when it serves her purpose. In the comment about about 10 deaths in Israel, it's fairly clear that Levitt is not making a bold claim about the distant future -- he's saying that given the case counts at the time, it would be surprising to see more than ten deaths, not predicting ten deaths in Israel, ever.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by mkolodny on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:18PM (#25584960)

According to the New York Times' "How Full Are I.C.U.s Near You?", AdventHealth Ocala in Florida is currently at 97% capacity with 56 Covid-19 patients, and the average I.C.U. in Florida is at 82% capacity.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Dr. Levitt: Your words have power. Use them carefully by timr on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @02:34PM (#25585119)

It's possible to find specific hospitals that are at/near capacity at nearly any time of year. Right now, hospitals across Florida appear to be at about 80% capacity, with individual hospitals ranging from 0% to 100% available:

https://bi.ahca.myflorida.com/t/ABICC/views/Public/HospitalB...

This is consistent with the CDC link my previous post. Of course, it's not possible to tell how this compares to any normal year, because we don't have that data.

[ Parent | on HN ]