Ronald B. Brown, Ph.D.
August 30, 2020
Haven’t students suffered enough from COVID-19 lockdowns since their schools were closed last March? Students have had their education interrupted in a way that no other generation of young people ever had to endure. University and college administrators, apparently more concerned about their bottom lines than the quality of education, continue to charge students full tuition for online education which for most students is more appropriate as a supplement to the bricks-and-mortar experience, not a substitute for it. Now, school administrators are playing “blame the victim” as U.S. universities and colleges attempt to reopen this fall.
Students have been reprimanded and threatened for not following strict social-distancing rules at social events, even as the incumbent President of the United States flaunts the same social-distancing rules during his nomination acceptance speech in front of a non-distanced audience on the White House lawn. Students are being threatened even while large anti-lockdown demonstrations in Berlin and London are poised to spread around the globe. The global population is becoming increasingly fed up with enforced lockdowns to flatten a curve that has long passed the crisis stage in most nations.
The behavior of school administrators toward student behavior is an example of confirmation bias, which promotes fearmongering and continues to cause unsupported overreaction to the coronavirus. Confirmation bias works by cherry picking only the evidence that confirms a finding, while ignoring evidence that refutes the finding. For example, a group of students who have gathered together in close contact without social-distancing is identified. The group is therefore immediately targeted for testing to detect the group prevalence of the coronavirus, based on the assumption that the infection was transmitted among the group members; but there is no experimental control group to make an unbiased determination if that assumption is correct or not. The prevalence of the infection within the identified group must be compared to the prevalence within a similar group of students who have not closely gathered without social distancing. But how often, if ever, does that experimental comparison between infected people and a control group occur? Without such a comparison, the evidence is anecdotal and the findings are biased. Therefore, lacking the design of a clinical case-control study (in this case, “case” refers to an infection, often asymptomatic), how can we blame the spread of the coronavirus on lack of social-distancing if no one knows the true prevalence of the coronavirus infection within the overall population?
Good news: The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is beginning a U.S. national serosurvey starting August 31, 2020 to determine the actual prevalence of the coronavirus infection within the national population. Bad news: Based on more complicated blood testing for antibodies, it will take 19 more months to complete the serosurvey by the end of March, 2022. In the meantime, lacking a sufficiently high standard of supporting scientific and clinical evidence, how much longer can students and the rest of the population follow strict lockdown and social-distancing orders based only on anecdotal evidence and confirmation bias?
Editorial note: For more from Dr. Ron Brown please read COVID-19 fatality rate “worst miscalculation in the history of humanity” says PhD candidate in epidemiology
