Have Nearly 90 Percent of Intubated Coronavirus Patients in New York Died?

The headlines about a peer-reviewed study have caused confusion.

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Media coverage of a recently published study on coronavirus patients in New York City hospitals led to some confusion on Twitter over the mortality rate of patients who required ventilator treatment:

https://twitter.com/gregpmiller/status/1253309953533771776
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  1. Avatar photo
    td12212

    The article has these two lines in it that should have caught the attention of even the most casual of reporters:

    Under the heading "Outcomes for patients who were discharged or died"
    "As of April 4, 2020, for patients requiring mechanical ventilation (n = 1151, 20.2%), 38 (3.3%) were discharged alive, 282 (24.5%) died, and 831 (72.2%) remained in hospital. Mortality rates for those who received mechanical ventilation in the 18-to-65 and older-than-65 age groups were 76.4% and 97.2%, respectively."

    Given the heading it's pretty clear they were talking about the 282(died)+38(discharged) folks.

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    Kenton A. Hoover

    Thank you Dispatch for doing a good job with this stuff. My wife and I (and a number of friends) have been getting progressively more distressed by how bad the reporting has been around COVID-19. WaPo and NPR have been particularly bad, and they both feed Facebook with click-bait takes on papers that don't say anything close to the claims. It doesn't take a STEM degree to know how to read an article beyond the abstract and we teach grade school kids on how to click through to the source. Hard to follow the science if you don't actually read it, but apparently you can explain it to others without reading it?

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  3. Mary Stine

    what the bleep?? A 60 % fatality rate ought to scare the bejeezus out of most of us!
    Never mind that this might be considered a "normal" outcome for those over 65..not everyone being intubated is even over 50! Some street artist should be hired to emblazon this on boardwalks to beaches and concrete walls near gyms so the "invincible" group get a better grip on what they or loved ones might be facing.

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  4. Sheva

    Thank you Alec for this excellent piece. This is a perfect example of what elevates The Dispatch over other news outlets. The problem here was not the JAMA article, which was transparent about the incompleteness of the outcomes it reported. The problem was the coverage. I looked up the JAMA paper and in the abstract--that's a brief summary that precedes every published scientific paper, they wrote "As of April 4, 2020, for patients requiring mechanical ventilation (n = 1151, 20.2%), 38 (3.3%) were discharged alive, 282 (24.5%) died, and 831 (72.2%) remained in hospital." The fact that final outcome was still unknown for a large majority (72%) of cases was not buried deep in the paper, it's right there in the abstract. WaPo just chose to ignore it. This is straight up dishonest reporting.

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    Earl King

    It was like a week ago I saw a chyron saying everybody who died had co-morbidities. it's like everything else...anecdotal evidence is interesting but not very scientific. Of the two chloroquine studies...one use high does and the other used it on those very sick...My suggestion to everyone is let the scientists and doctors determine where we go with the virus.

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    Kevin Durant?

    You could have just posted the Eddie Glaude tweet and that would've been enough to know the data was intentionally misleading

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      Idontdocute

      I don't know if the data was misleading or if they just didn't look at the parameters. It's a very good thing that the large numbers of patients are still on the vents because they are still in the game. They will later help bring down the numbers, with time. That so many already ill senior citizens with a wicked list of comorbid conditions were treated aggressively tells me the doctors took up the fight for all of their patients and gave them a chance, no matter how slim.

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        Kevin Durant?

        Yes, poor wording. Data is data. It was presented in a way that was intentionally misleading

        This is why I scoff at people who use “data and science” as a crutch. It is almost always manipulation and lies and this is why people don’t trust experts. Experts, especially the ones who make their way into the news, are very often partisan first, expert second, which totally negates any benefit you would gain from the fact that they have training

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          Idontdocute

          It's somewhat unfair to take some expert's information and hold them accountable for someone else's attempt to chop it up to put it into a tweet or a one paragraph article that follows an attention grabbing title. We are going to be faced with a very fast changing and frequent information dumping as we work our way through this because right now sharing is caring.

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          cheerio

          You must be a "go with my gut" kind of guy.

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            Kevin Durant?

            I don’t have a gut and I hate that phrase

            It’s incredibly naive to believe that ‘science’ presented to you by motivated hacks is actual science

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    Billy.Faires

    Thanks for this one. It's so frustrating. In one corner, you have nuance and complexity. In the other corner, you have clickbait and attention-grabbing. It's like Little Mac having to square off against Mike Tyson, except we're handing the Nintento controls to my septuagenarian mother and acting like it's a fair fight.

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    Ray Salemi

    Are the fact checks behind the paywall? This sort of information may be a good marketing vehicle.

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    1. Sheva

      Agreed. This one especially.

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    Nathan

    This is helpful. Thank you and good work.

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    Ray Salemi

    So what was the reason for publishing an incomplete study?

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      Idontdocute

      Maybe not incomplete study, but an in progress study trying to reliable information in a respected journal as fast as possible to many fronts internationally as possible. What the press or the social media does with it after that is probably not a concern at this point.

      I think it has been less then 2 weeks that we started chasing D-diner to endotheliitis and now maybe the pulmonary might actually be partially vascular response in some patients. Anybody on a vent or ECMO is going to have some clotting issues or concerns but to have the clotting off of dialysis filters or clots reforming in real time while you surgically remove them is a full holy duck moment. It wasn't published for public consumption, it was published to help save them.

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        Idontdocute

        D-dimer...edit button....anyone.

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      Azlefty

      Probably to get information out quickly; a complete study often takes a year or longer.

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About Alec Dent

Alec Dent is the culture editor and a staff writer for The Dispatch. He is a graduate of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC Chapel Hill, and previously oversaw The Dispatch's fact checking team.
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