californiaglobe.com
I dont know if it is posted yet but watch the entire thing for a good lesson.
It's always been about economics and trashing Trump at all costs. Come election time...well, we have about 6 months to get ready. Not just ready but ready ready.
This is cut and paste from:
His response there sites screenshots from their study to site where/how they got their info, but that was a little much to also cut and paste.
What they did was simple: they looked at the fraction of patients who tested positive for #COVID19 at the clinics they own. They found 340 out of 5213 tests were postive, about 6.6% Then they assume the same fraction of the whole population are infected.
From there, they scale up to the state level and claim 12% incidence statewide. The news story says it is using the same calculation, but it can't be—how did they get from 6.6% to 12%? Perhaps they estimating infected *ever* versus infected *currently*. It's not clear.
Using that 12% infected figure, and a known 1400 deaths in California, they assume 1400 out of 4.7 million have died. That gives them an infection fatality rate of 0.03%. That is, they think that if 10,000 are infected, 3 will die on average.
The problem with this approach is that during a pandemic, the people who come into an urgent care clinic are not a random sample of the population. A large fraction of them are coming in precisely because they suspect that they have the disease. This generates sampling bias.
Estimating that fraction infected from patients at an urgent care facility is a bit like estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court. It's not a random sample, and it gives a highly biased estimate.