LETTER: Statistical malpractice

In a recent letter to The Press, Mr. Steven Abbott — quoting a recent Breitbart magazine article — cites COVID-19 antibody testing at a single Chicago hospital as proof that at least 100 million Americans have had COVID-19, and further concludes that the U.S. is at the tail end of the infection.

Mr. Abbott has made an unjustified, and almost certainly wrong assumption. If he had read the Chicago City Wire and Chicago Sun Times articles Breitbart cribbed, he would have found that those Cook County residents tested for COVID-19 antibodies had, or recently had symptoms of the infection. Imagine the fantastical ideas Mr. Abbott might have if he generalized the prevalence of other afflictions found in that one Chicago emergency department to all of the U.S. Needless to say, it is hardly a representative sample of Americans.

Mr. Abbott’s statistical malpractice aside, his conclusion that the U.S. is at the tail end of the pandemic simply doesn’t match the empirically observable facts. If the peak of the infection had already passed, New York wouldn’t be just now filling FEMA refrigerator trucks with an overflow of dead, or pulling overtime filling its mass graves. And American physicians would certainly have noticed this wave of tens of thousands of flu-like deaths unattributable to influenza.

DR. MATT K. PETERSEN

Coeur d’Alene