Recent opinion column was rife with COVID misinformation

After losing six people to COVID-19, I vowed to call out COVID misinformation like that espoused in Joyce Parker’s recent op ed column.

The author is retired from an IT career. She has no medical degree, training or experience treating patients. She didn’t take an oath to “do no harm.” Her opinion deserves no weight in the court of public opinion.

Her opinions about “natural immunity” and financial incentives for COVID reporting are disturbing. The medical community didn’t initially embrace natural immunity because they needed to conduct studies to determine how robust it is, and how long it lasts. What she fails to mention about natural immunity is that some may suffer long-term health problems like our family friend in his 40s who ran marathons, whose lungs and body were so damaged by COVID that he now is in a rehabilitation facility learning to walk again.

Remarks that financial incentives for hospitals to put patients on ventilators and to distort reporting are especially outrageous. The process of being put on a ventilator can be terrifying for a patient, and difficult for medical staff. If hospitals were abusing this process for financial gain, medical staff would voice their objections. Patients are put on ventilators when they desperately need them, not because hospitals want to make more money.

When doctors sign death certificates and cite COVID as a cause of death, they provide a professional certification. When hospitals accept COVID funds they are bound by rules and regulations. If doctors and hospitals are falsifying death certificates and misusing public funds why have there been no lawsuits? Surely the Texas and Florida attorneys general would gladly file them to embarrass the current administration. They haven’t because the falsifications don’t exist, or are so few in number that they are not worth pursuing.

To get a real education about COVID, the author should get off her computer, volunteer at a COVID clinic or hospital and spend some time with heroes in the medical community treating COVID patients. Then she would understand that those who die from COVID die a miserable death.

The CDC may have imposed rules that in hindsight were not perfect, that inconvenienced us and made life difficult, but they were trying to save the lives of people like Helen, Luciano, Jose, Ricardo, Billie and Ber. May they rest in peace.