Matt Schlapp Makes Several False Claims About Coronavirus in TV Appearance

The chairman of the ACU is wrong about testing windows, being asymptomatic, and contagion points.

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Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, appeared on America’s Newsroom on Fox News to discuss the concerns of coronavirus spreading at the Conservative Political Action Conference after one attendee tested positive. He proceeded to get several things wrong about the virus.

“What we can’t do is get people thinking that the test is what matters,” Schlapp told host Sandra Smith.

“What matters is your symptoms. What matters is your symptoms, Sandra. I don’t have any. The president doesn’t have any. These lawmakers [who had attended CPAC and are now self-quarantining] don’t have any. And one more important thing: they’re outside the all-important nine-day windows. They do not have corona.”

Despite Schlapp’s assurance that he, the president, and the lawmakers in question are in the clear, it is unclear exactly when it is safe to make that call without testing. Abundant research indicates that in most cases symptoms will actually display themselves sooner than the nine-day period that Schlapp cites, though a lengthier incubation period is possible. Symptoms typically start to appear about five days after infection, though it can take the disease 14 days to incubate. It is exceptionally rare for incubation to take longer than 14 days, and only does so in 101 out of every 10,000 cases.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Octávio Lima

    That a politician who is trying to push an agenda would be so reckless as to go on camera with bad information does not inspire confidence in his ability to lead people. It should make people very skeptical of everything they say. But we do not make our homework these days and believe these people blindly.

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  2. Ragnar

    In this very well researched piece that is regularly updated with new information, the claim that the virus is passed by asymptomatic patience is disputed. I'd love to see this inconsistency resolved.

    Link: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the-comprehensive-ars-technica-guide-to-the-coronavirus/2/#h2

    Section: How does coronavirus transmission compare with flu?

    Text:

    “Both COVID-19 and influenza cause respiratory disease and spread the same way, via small droplets of fluid from the nose and mouth of someone who is sick,” he said. “However… COVID-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza, from the data we have so far. With influenza, people who are infected but not yet sick are major drivers of transmission, which does not appear to be the case for COVID-19.”

    While media reports have widely circulated fears that asymptomatic people are silently spreading COVID-19 around communities and countries, there is little data to back that up. In fact, asymptomatic cases appear rare and potentially misclassified.

    Dr. Tedros noted that only 1 percent of cases in China are reported as “asymptomatic.” And of that 1 percent, 75 percent do go on to develop symptoms.

    For COVID-19, the data indicates that people coughing and sneezing are the biggest drivers of the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, the thrust of the epidemic in China has been from the spread of the virus through households and close contacts, not unconnected community members."

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    cheerio

    It is my worst nightmare to be the person who spread it to a vulnerable person making them ill and threatening their life. I am a healthcare professional and love my patients. I would not want to harm them for all the world. I get the flu shot every year. A few weeks ago, I had flu symptoms and felt so guilty calling in sick. I immediately went to my Dr. office (which btw, has a side entrance now for Corona virus suspected symptomatic people). I donned a mask and they tested me with the rapid test which came out negative. My Dr. said that he was finding it had a 60% false negative rate so reswabbed me for a culture test which came back positive for Influenza A. I felt badly because the day before I was at work chatting with an infectious disease Dr. about the flu and corona and was potentially infecting the people there. All my work colleagues had to have their temps checked for 5 days. This virus is a lot more contagious and a simple mask does not help.

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    1. Nathan Shiba

      And yet you cheer for Rush Limbaugh's death. My, that's a contrast that's difficult for one to wrap their head around. Perhaps it's just frustration at what is clearly a taxing situation for you and others on the front line fighting this virus.

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        cheerio

        Well, Rush Limbaugh has his karma and I have mine.

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  4. Max Amoss

    I'm not a currently practicing medical expert but I did work for 40 years in academic allied medicine with over 200 publications. That being said a concern of mine is the constant reiteration that "only" (you name it) 2% of the population of folks with the coronavirus have died. And it may be a lot less when the actual number of coronavirus carriers are known. But after all is said and done if you are one of those whose health is compromised for any reason and you die the probability was 100%. Although I don't smoke and am in pretty good health for someone in his 8th decade, I would ask everyone to use common sense and do what they can to protect old duffers like me and possibly your parents or grandparents. Thank you!!

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  5. Pop Kennedy

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-testing-intl-hnk/index.html

    South Korea does not agree with you!
    Test when you have systems!

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  6. Avatar photo
    Aylene Wright

    This is great, thanks for interviewing an actual medical expert for this fact check.

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    1. Catherine Lowe

      Thanks for the positive feedback.

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  7. Avatar photo
    David

    I am not disputing the substance of the fact check which appears largely correct and which I am not expert enough to evaluate. This seems to be where the the evidence is converging, that the vast majority of infections result from people with symptoms coming in contact with others who they then infect, usually as a result of something more than minimal contact.

    And this administration and their cohorts is incompetent in so many way, not least in their inability to communicate effectively.

    But I think you left something important out of this analysis. Schlapp's statements are, in a broad and general sense, more accurate than you give them credit for and more accurate generally than a lot of the garbage making the rounds this week.

    1. Do the tests matter, or the symptoms? Well, ideally, we could test everyone 3 times a day, but no one anywhere is pulling this off since the tests available couldn't possibly give you useful data in this period even if they were available (see the news about a test with 8 hour results just being developed). It is just damned close to logistically impossible to test often enough to substantially narrow the window between onset of communicability and onset of symptoms for a large population. This isn't as true if you focus on high risk cases however. So right now, for the average American, symptoms are your best guide and increased availability of testing only kinda changes that.

    2. How many asymptomatic carriers are there out there? Well, we don't know is a pretty good answer. But contrary to the hype, it does not appear there there are thousands of typhoid Mary's wandering the streets. As I understand it, the best way to determine how likely this is, is to test the general population for antibodies to the infection after the infection has been around long enough to provide useful information. The Chinese experience (if we believe them) is that the number of truly asymptomatic carriers was small. There is contrary evidence as well, but it's all very hard to evaluate right now. Add to all that the point you make, that transmitting the virus seems, just as a matter of mechanism for doing so, to require having symptoms, and the evidence favors the notion that reacting properly to symptoms is critical.

    3. Okay, so this leads to the key point. There is a lot of talk about an R0 and particularly about the R0 of 2.5 China reports as being the estimate they calculate for the early days of their crisis. The R0 is the estimated number of people a single carrier will infect on average if that carrier is in a population mostly unprotected from the virus. An R0 of 2.5 is bad. It means, in the absence of other factors, exponential growth. To avoid exponential growth, that number needs to be below 1 - although the interaction with the population and all the factors involved require some pretty complex math that would crush me like a bug. Let's use your numbers (a bit sloppily I confess) as an example.

    If the average carrier infects 2.5 people under normal circumstances, thats bad.
    If the same carrier totally isolates him or herself for 6 days from any contact (impossible since you can't actually know about contacts, but it's a hypothetical), and then stops, that same carrier, all else being equal (also unlikely) would effectively drop their individual "R0" (I don't think this is a thing, but I'm using the term anyway) to 0.125. If everyone in the US did that, no problem.

    Similarly if you react only when there are symptoms, you might still spread the disease and doing better than that saves lives. But let's stick some numbers in. If every American isolated themselves totally when they had any symptoms, we might reduce transmission by, lets say, 80%. That drops the effective R0 to 0.5. Better.

    Now add to that all the other measures being recommended. Wash your hands, wash your food, avoid contact, avoid crowds, etc. and you create conditions for pushing the spread rate down dramatically.

    Does this mean I plan on being cavalier about any of it. Heck no. Each individual is responsible for themselves and the people around them and each percentage point you squeeze out of your individual actions is the chance of preventing death or harm to people around you.

    But as a general course of action and in terms of messaging, which is better, (1) go wandering about town looking for tests, or (2) everyone needs to be vigilant all the time and doubly so if you have, or interact with someone with symptoms?

    More tests are better. Particularly for dealing with people in the health care system and for dealing with people around a known cluster. But a lot of the talk about tests is distracting from the fact that the real control mechanism is people acting wisely - and that really is a matter of self isolation for at least 6, but preferably as many as 14 days after a known contact, and of watching out for symptoms in yourself and others as a good proxy for the likelihood of getting or sharing an infection. (if you know you just got sneezed on twice by a sick dude, that would be a good time to decide to self isolate).

    Schlapp mangled the explanation and turned what should have been a pretty clear message into a trip to the weeds.

    If the White House wasn't a messaging mess, they'd be saying these thing, which in this situation is almost their only job. Our amazing health care workers, and our mostly sensible citizenry can do the rest.

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      Aylene Wright

      Also, no test is 100% accurate. Testing people with a higher pre-test probability, either because of symptoms or being in a higher risk demographic, will make for a better accuracy than testing low risk people.

      Also, the tests coming to market now are taking advantage of the FDA Emergency Use Authorization process to fast track approval instead of having to jump through all the hoops in the standard FDA approval process. While this is likely a good thing overall, the downside is that a lower quality test may wind up being approved than under the standard process. So there is still some room for "caveat emptor" here.

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        David

        Yep, definitely. Also worth pointing out, according to Business Insider South Korea has administered ~3,300 tests per million people. As everyone but Brian Williams can recognize, that is way less than even 1%. More tests is better, but no one is planning on testing everyone and sitting around waiting for that to happen causes more harm than good. Listen to the good advice out there and do your best to do your part.

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          Michael Carpenter

          Honestly, most molecular biology graduate students could come up with a test that works effectively. Most of these tests are based on qPCR and, while it is true that there are always false negatives and false positives, with proper controls this isn't a huge issue with a well designed test. The appropriate control samples are positive controls where viral RNA is always present and negative controls where viral RNA should never be present. On our machine, we could easily do >350 tests per hour with controls. There are at least 4 of these in my building and I have no idea how many on campus. We bought our Roche 480 Lightcycler with an NIH grant which is to say that we bought it with taxpayer dollars. Under situations like this, why shouldn't our machine be drafted into assisting with the testing? Maybe a few expert users as well. All we need are few DNA oligos (2-3 days from IDT) Most of the other stuff (buffers and enzymes) we already have and most of it was purchased with money we got from taxpayers.

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            David

            You're not wrong, but it just isn't the whole answer. Testing is an important part of a reasonable response. It just isn't the magical solution to anything. What do you expect the false positive rate to be with different people of different skill working around the clock on monotonous stuff will be? 1 in 1000? I think that is probably a generous estimate based on experience, right? So who do we test? Everyone? Forget the logistics for a second, let's say we could do it instantaneously. Its the morning of day 1 and you have 330,000 people on their way to an emergency room.

            I think it is also fair to think if it were quite this easy there wouldn't actually be a problem. But the logistics is massive and its clear its taking very competent labs a lot of effort to put the tests coming on line together.

            The correct response, as repeated by every health care professional out there, is to stop interacting unnecessarily, wash hands, clean surfaces, avoid public gatherings, etc. These are the things that make the difference. Testing adds a lot to that by allowing people to screen health workers and other folks that can't avoid contact, and to helping track spread in growing clusters. Very valuable.

            But message one has to be the very message sane folks are repeating. The whole game comes down to everyone avoiding needless contact, particularly when someone has symptoms, etc.

            The testing story is a failure, sure. But this is America. We expect government to fail. Getting this right is on us. Stay safe. Testing will come - late, but probably still welcomed.

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    Michelle O

    Thank you. These are useful fact checks. Keep it up!

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  9. Nita Hardin

    geez. if you are NOT a healthcare professional, SHUT THE HELL UP. there's enough woo already out there, this is far too dangerous to be spewing your two cents about.

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    1. Nathan Shiba

      And why are reporters asking medical questions of political hacks? It's incomprehensible.

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        Bill Nelson

        I agree. A waste of air time best reserved for Magnum PI re-runs (my favorite).

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          David V

          I went to HS in Hawaii in the '80s. I still watch Magnum for the nostalgia value -- views of the way it was when I was there.

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        Jenny

        I'm not anti-media, but I think they sometimes ask politicians questions because they expect crazy answers. Lots of politicians deliver the goods.

        Excellent point. I think they should be keeping the questions to the line of 'what is the government response to ____?'

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