Show notes
ladies and gentlemen, family and friends from around the country and literally around the world. This is another episode with your host, David J. Harris, jr, and today I have the privilege. And the honor of having dr Dan Erickson on with me. He and his coat doctor that owned the several urgent cares in Kern County absolutely exploded the internet. YouTube took their video down because of the information that some of what she's going to share, and we're going to get a little bit deeper into that as well. It's a privilege to have on with me this morning, dr Dan Erickson, dr Dan, how are you doing today? My brother. You know, it's 84 degrees here in Southern California and I'm feeling good. That's good. Did you have any idea that your video was going to go so epically viral? Shh. No, this, this was, we were supposed to give a raw data sharing to our local media. They were going to record it and do a two minute news segment. And then somehow it went Facebook live and kind of went all over the place. So no, this was, this was a fireside chat for Kern County. That's all it was intended to be. And you and your, uh, your, your, the co owner of the, um, the urgent cares, you are actual coven 19 doctors. You've been asked and tasked with conducting research and collecting data on individuals in your area. Correct. Yeah, we've, we've done almost close to 7,000 tests. We do the nasal swab and we're just starting to do the IgG immunity test. We weren't, we weren't essentially elected. We just noticed there was a demand for testing. So we, we set aside one of our main corporate centers to start doing a lot of testing. We've done close to 7,000 and where we'd have about 8.3% positives via PCR method, which is the nasal swab to this point. How different is that from the current studies that we're hearing from CDC, from the original, uh, from the original expectations of, of, uh, how many people we're going to contract this or have contracted it. And then compare that to em to the mortality rate. How, how off from the original, which has kind of created this entire pandemic of stay at home orders. Where does that compare? Well, I think you have to go back a couple months ago when we were using sort of these academic models and they were predict predicting, you know, 2.2 million deaths, which obviously has not been materialized. Uh, the second wave of predictions comes from Stanford, from LA County. Where Stanford looked at 3,300 people. They did antibody tests and they found 2.6 to 4.1% of the people in the population of Santa Clara had, uh, had immunity. Well, their public health department had 956 on record. So what dr Leo Natus and others are saying is. It's actually 50 times that they said it's more like 50 to 80,000 cases instead of 956 so the, the these studies we're seeing are saying that it's a lot more prevalent. Prevalent means the, the amount of current disease, it's a lot more prevalent than we initially thought. And if it's a lot more prevalent, the death rate therefore, is much lower. So now we see, uh, then dr Fowchee as been found saying, this is the new England journal, the death rate around the country, uh, the highest we're seeing is 0.5. I think dr Fowchee said under 1%. So 99 to 99.5% of people who get get better. When did you first realize that something was wrong with the testing and the reporting on the testing? Well, I wouldn't say something's wrong with the testing. I would say that what I was trying to do was give the people of Kern County a realistic sense of my data. I said, we're not New York. We're not, we're not China. So I said, I've done, at that time, I had done 5,000, 213 tests. Uh, I had gotten about a 6.5% positive, which was 340 at that time. And I said, here's my data. And I said, California at that time had. You know, I was going over the positives and how much testing had been done and the death rate and just giving raw data. It was not a, a biostatistical analysis. It was not, you know, supposed to, uh, set the record. I was just going over what is out there and making some, some kind of predictions on the prevalence, but because we didn't have good data, so I said, why don't we, let's just go over the raw data and see what we're coming up with. And it turns out that now, you know, the studies out of New York are showing New York state has likely 14% positive New York city, 21% positive. So we're seeing millions of cases, which really lowers the death rate in New York. Uh, per the article I read yesterday too, about 0.5%, meaning people who have tested positive, uh, ended up dying from it and about a 0.5% positive rate. I'm so thankful that you chose to do the study, do the research. I know you told me earlier that you were just on a panel, a discussion panel with Tony Robbins and several other, um, head epidemiologists. What was that? Did they ask you your input from we, from your research, and how did they respond to your data? Well, I think my data is raw and you know, you can't, my dad, my dad. Yeah. A number of things we talked about were speculative cause they haven't been bio statistically analyze. They haven't been peer reviewed. So I want to be clear on that. It was an opinion piece about what I thought in Kern County, Kern County currently has 13 deaths out of almost a million people. So I think what we have to look at is, you know, are we doing the right steps now? Now that we're getting data back and we're seeing these deaths rates that are under 1%. Should we continue in this lockdown phase? I think that's the important conversation now is what we did two months ago, I think was appropriate. We saw this virus, this novel, new virus coming out of China. We said, man, this thing seems to be moving fast, causing a lot of death. What should we do? So we isolated people. We put masks on, we socially distance until we had a couple months of data. Now that we have that. We have to ask ourselves, is the collateral damage? For instance, uh, the suicides I've, I've been dealing with the depression, the anxiety, the loss of revenue, economic collapse is, is it now, should we stay on a shelter in place pathway or is it time to start opening up the economy now that we have a lot more data? So that's, that's really the question. I think we all have to answer at this point. What kind of spikes have you seen? You mentioned that you've personally been dealing with suicides. What kind of spikes have you seen in some of these, uh, in some of these issues when it comes to the individuals that are staying at home can't go anywhere? Uh, what percentage of increase have you seen? I can tell you about a case. Uh, I'll just use a specific case that I have that a 23 year old male, uh, was, was let go because of COBIT. He had some baseline depression. Uh, and he ended up taking pills and drinking himself and ended up in the ICU on event. These kinds of cases. These are, these are what I'm seeing. I don't have a big database of it. Over the last month, I'm talking to doctors from. You know, from Wisconsin, I'm reading reports of doctors that are in the Bronx and what they're seeing, and I'm putting it all together and saying, as a collective, this is what I'm seeing around the country. This is my opinion on what I'm seeing. I think that's what's important. I don't have a biostatistical, uh, database to pull from saying, you know, suicide has gone up 12%. I think that data might be, they're putting it together now, and I've heard from the Sheriff's office, Sheriff's office that, you know, violent crimes, alcoholism, they're getting a lot more nine one one calls, but I don't have the actual figures to go from, well, you're, you're, you're right in the thick of it. You're seeing it and you're talking to the doctors that are seeing it and the effects of this, these stay at home orders that so many governors are still implementing and keeping in place. It seems like it's definitely causing more damage to the American people. Uh, than it is helping. Do you believe the governor's following real science, or do you think there are doctors and experts with a political agenda who are giving out bad information? Well, I, I'm not, I'm not really a psychiatrist. I don't know what they're thinking. But what I will say is, I think. It w what we need to do is look at the approaches that have been taking globally. Let's look at South Korea. Let's look at Sweden. Let's look at the United Kingdom. The death rate per million in, uh, in Sweden right now is about 300. The UK is about 500. Sweden is not on lockdown. Kids under 16 are in school. Businesses are opening. They're limiting groups under 50 and people are allowed to move about outside their homes without being arrested or penalize. In the UK, they're on full lockdown and their results are not much better. So when I asked the epidemiologist this question, they say, I think that flattening the curve actually lengthens the disease cycle. So instead of kind of allowing the herd immunity to go up and come back down, it sort of drags out this herd immunity. Because hurting unity is, you know, one of the strategies for getting through these viruses. Every year the flu comes in and we vaccinate people, people get the flu, and the flu essentially burns itself out. As we start to move outdoors and get later in the, uh, in April and may, it starts in December, last for three or four months. Each year it burns itself out and we have a vaccine for it. The vaccine. Some years is more effective than others, and not everybody takes the vaccine. So I think the vaccine helps, but it's not always the answer to these, these viruses that spread through our communities. Yeah. I've, we and our family choose, choose not to vaccine. And I haven't had anything really damaging. I rarely actually ever gets sick, but I also take high doses of vitamin C if I'm feeling something coming on vitamin D, vitamin a, and M, I seem to get through it. So if you take that into consideration, there's a lot of Americans that don't vaccinate and we don't see, you know, total pandemic style reaction to people getting the flu. It really makes you wonder why we've done that. You said in your video that California hospitals were at a minimum capacity. Is that still the case? And if so, how come governor Newsome is ratcheting up the stay at home owners, uh, by closing down beaches? Well, I can only, I can only speak for, uh, for central California. I, I speak to their, their CEO's and I asked them and they said their census was low. Some hospitals said 40%. Some said, uh, they definitely were lower than normal. I said, do you have surge capacity if we should have a secondary spike? They said, yes, and we get secondary spikes with the normal flu, uh, that we're, we're used to. So every year, sometimes in December, it starts out slow. By the end of January, you see the tents outside of the hospitals, you know, they're, they'll surge sometimes instead of seeing 250 a day, they'll see, you know, 400 a day. We're used to that. We're used to flu cycles. That surge. So I think it's important that people know most hospitals have surge capacity, and if you have to put tents up for a few weeks to deal with it, that's okay. I mean, we're used to that. I asked him, do you have enough ventilators? Yes, we do. I said, they, I said last week, in fact, there was 14 patients in the hospital with Kelvin and there was three on ventilators. Out of the system of almost a million people. So I, I, I, I'm trying to get real numbers and data to say, this is what's going on in Kern County. I can't speak to all of California, but I have heard, uh, similar, uh, similar stories in LA where doctors are telling me, you know, our volume, we used to see, you know, we're probably seeing 40 to 50% less volume. They've had to furlough doctors and nurses because. They just don't have the volume of patients. And a lot of it's fear. I talked to an ER doctor in Wisconsin, just finished a night shift, and he, I said, how'd it go? He said, well, I had a patient come in with chest pain who had started three days ago, but he was too afraid to come in abdominal pain. That's waiting. And so these things that we can treat when they wait for days, they're dealing with a much more significant problem. So I think fear, fear is causing some secondary medical problems. Uh, even at the clinic I'm at today, I was talking to the doctor. He said, a patient came in with an infection that they'd had for many days, but was afraid to come in and get checked out. So you can see there's collateral damage to the fear. People are driving around their cars with face masks and they won't get their medical problems addressed because they think they're going to get covered by coming into a facility. When I hear that, it makes me think about the video that was just released where CBS basically got caught, uh, staging a covert 19 testing site and willingly and knowingly put it on the air, shared it on their morning news segment where they had additional people lined up to take tests. The nurses actually on video were sharing that. Most of them weren't even actually being tested. They said that they were just faking it. When you hear, when you know what's going on and you see what's going on with some of these individuals that are literally out of fear, not going to the hospital, get to get something treated that they should, and then you hear that CBS is intentionally fear-mongering. How does that make you feel as a doctor? Well, that's one of the reasons why I was, I was trying to be really forthcoming with the media cause they were parking outside my building. You know, always looking for interviews. And I said, I want to make sure people understand that we're, we're doing a lot of testing. Uh, and we're seeing about six and a half percent. We're not seeing a lot of hospitalization. And most people have a fairly mild illness. They'll have some cough. Some fever and they typically get over it without going to the hospital. So I think one of my, one of my key messages was just to reassure people that most people, unless you're, you know, over 70 with multiple medical problems, these are the people that succumb to the illness. If you look at the nursing homes, uh, throughout the different countries, they got hit hard. And I think maybe one of the things we could have done better in this country is initially. You know, isolate the vulnerable, which are the elderly, which are the immune compromised. Let's isolate the vulnerable and not necessarily isolate those young and healthy under 50, who have a very good chance of getting over it with no hospitalization and almost no symptoms. You know, that, uh, governor Cuomo actually allowed nurses that were working in, uh, in, uh, elderly homes, retirement homes. With Cobra 19 to still continue to work, uh, around elderly. And, uh, it's like, what kind of reasoning could you think of for a governor saying, go ahead and keep working in these areas where the most highly risk individuals, the elderly are there and these nurses have covert 19. How does that, what do you think about that? Yeah, it's tough to, it's tough to throw a stone at that. Sometimes that's a staffing issue. Uh, I always, I always like to know the facts before I comment, but you know, our, our staff has a w…
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