In a widely shared YouTube video that many people on social media are using to argue that lockdowns were a costly error, a California-based osteopath named Daniel Erickson presents data from his chain of urgent care clinics to claim: “We don’t need to worry about COVID-19 because it’s less dangerous than the seasonal flu.†But this video, like so many others circulating online, is built on flawed reasoning and misleading data. If you take what Erickson is saying at face value, you could end up seriously misinformed—and potentially putting yourself and others at risk. Update: The video has since been removed from YouTube, and both the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) have issued a joint statement condemning it as inaccurate and financially motivated. Erickson is technically a physician, but not an MD. He isn’t an infectious disease specialist, immunologist, epidemiologist, or researcher, and he’s no longer in active clinical practice. But even if we set aside his credentials, the argument he makes in this video is fundamentally flawed—so much so that it's essentially meaningless. The video, which is better understood through its transcript, is full of errors—some obvious, others more subtle. However, the most glaring mistake is that Erickson confuses test positivity rates with community attack rates. This is a critical misunderstanding of how public health data works. Let’s break down exactly what Erickson said in the video: So if you look at California—these numbers are from yesterday—we have 33,865 COVID cases, out of a total of 280,900 total tested. That’s 12% of Californians were positive for COVID. So we don’t, the initial — as you guys know, the initial models were woefully inaccurate. They predicted millions of cases of death — not of prevalence or incidence — but death. That is not materializing. What is materializing is, in the state of California is 12% positives. You have a 0.03 chance of dying from COVID in the state of California. This is where things go off the rails. Erickson is taking a test positivity rate (the percentage of tests that come back positive) and using it to suggest that 12% of the population has already been infected. But this is a huge leap in logic. Currently, testing in the U.S. is mostly limited to symptomatic individuals, especially those with severe symptoms. We aren’t testing everyone, which means the sample is not representative of the entire population. It’s like estimating how many people in a city are Catholic by only asking people at a communion line. As if that wasn’t enough, Erickson repeats the same flawed logic using data from New York, the U.S. as a whole, Sweden, and Norway. This fundamental misunderstanding is at the core of his entire argument. It’s important to understand how test positivity rates work. In countries with widespread, random testing—like Iceland—the numbers tell a different story. But in the U.S., the tested population is not the same as the general population. Those who get tested are more likely to be sick, which skews the results. For example, in Washington State, which was hit hard early on, test positivity dropped from 100% in March to around 8% today. Why? Because they expanded testing to include more people, including those with mild or no symptoms. As testing becomes more widespread, the percentage of positive tests usually goes down. This shows that test positivity rates can actually decrease as more people are tested—contrary to what Erickson implies. Beyond his confusion over test positivity, Erickson also claims that the fatality rate of COVID-19 is lower than that of the seasonal flu. But this is simply not supported by the data. The seasonal flu has a case fatality rate (CFR) of roughly 0.1%. However, in New York City alone, nearly 0.2% of the entire population has died from COVID-19. Even if only 20% of the population has been infected, the actual fatality rate would still be higher than the flu. What’s more, these numbers are still rising. With ongoing transmission and limited immunity, the true death toll will likely be far greater than any flu season in recent history. If you see someone sharing this video on social media, it’s worth taking a moment to explain why it’s misleading. The truth is, the science is clear: COVID-19 is more dangerous than the flu, and the data supports that conclusion. Suzhou Herstar Medical Technology Co., Ltd. , https://www.hosunherstar.comA list of major mistakes
Understanding test positivity rates
Flawed conclusions and misleading comparisons