Dr. Dan Erickson, owner of Accelerated Urgent Care clinics in Bakersfield, California is exasperated by the lockdown, finding it to be completely unnecessary and much more harmful than a disease that has a lower mortality rate to the annual flu.
He says that putting people who are not acutely ill on lockdown will have the effect of weakening their immune systems. Further, by collapsing the small businesses, the loss of income is causing people to lose their dreams. People are turning to drugs and alcohol and there’s been a noticeable spike in child abuse.
He says, “Does this make sense? Are we following the science? We keep hearing ‘Following the science.’ What is science, essentially? It’s the study of the natural world through experiment, through observation. So, that’s what we’re doing. We’re studying the disease around us or making observations; we’re doing testing experiments to figure out exactly what’s going on…
“Hospitals…they’re shutting down floors, they’re furloughing patients, they’re furloughing doctors, so the health system has been evacuated in certain places.
“In New York, the health system is working at maximum capacity. In California, we’re really at a minimal capacity, getting rid of our doctors and nurses, because we just don’t have the volume…
“The initial models were were woefully inaccurate. They predicted millions of cases of death; not of prevalence or incidence – but death. That is not materializing.
“What is materializing in the state of California is 12% positives. We’ve seen 1,227 deaths in the state of California, with a possible incidence or prevalence of 4.7 million. That means you have a 0.03% chance of dying from COVID-19 in the state of California.
“I also wanted to mention that 96% of people in California who get COVID recover with almost no significant sequelae or no significant continuing medical problems.
“So, I want to look at New York State. They’ve been in the news a lot right, and their numbers are critical. Let’s go over their numbers. Cases of COVID, as of yesterday, 256,272 cases in New York State…of 649,325. That’s 39% of New Yorkers tested positive for COVID-19.
“That’s their ratios. This is public data online. You can all look it up. How many deaths do they have: 19,410. Ten out of 19 million people, which is a 0.1% chance of dying from COVID in the state of New York – and they have a 92% recovery rate…
“USA. This is a big one for us: 802,560 as of yesterday gives us a 19.6% positive out of those who are tested so…If this is a typical extrapolation: 328 million people times 19.6 is 64 million. That’s a significant amount of people with COVID-19.
“It’s similar to the flu. If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018, we had 50 to 60 million with the flu and we had a similar death rate. In the United States, there were 43,545, similar to the flu of 2017-2018.
“We have always had between 37,000-60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter-in-place. No shutting down businesses. No sending doctors home.
“COVID-19 is one aspect of our health sector. What has it caused to have us be involved in social isolation…Child molestation is increasing at a severe rate. We could go over multiple cases of children who have been molested, due to angry family members who are intoxicated, who are home, who have no paycheck.
“These things last a lifetime. This isn’t about a seasonal flu. These are things that will follow these people and affect them in a negative fashion for their life and these are secondary effects from COVID…
“Talking to EMS, talking to my doctors and talking to people across the country and finding out what they’re seeing: spousal abuse. We see people coming in here with black eyes and cuts on their face. It’s an obvious abusive case. These are things that will affect them for a lifetime, not for a season.
“Alcoholism, anxiety, depression, suicide. I’ve talked to Donna Youngblood and various people in the community. I’ve asked them how are things going? Suicide is spiking, education has dropped off, economic collapse of the medical industry. We’re all suffering because our staff isn’t here and we have no volume.
“These are all real things that I’m seeing every day. I don’t read about this stuff. I’m seeing it in my clinics. We have clinics from Fresno to San Diego and these things are spiking in our community. These things will affect people for a lifetime, not for a season.
“So, let’s let’s make sure we’re clear, that you’ve got all the statistics now. I want to compare flu virus. Is this significantly different? Deaths, per the CDC: 24,000 to 62,000 deaths each year. We had about 45 million total cases in 2017, with about 62,000 deaths or a 0.13% chance of death from flu in the United States. As you know, our other numbers were 0.02%. So, the lethality of COVID-19 is much less.
“Then, when you when you bring up a system of lockdown, you’ll automatically have to compare it to a system of no lockdown.
“The immune system is built by exposure to antigens, viruses, bacteria. When you’re a little child, crawling on the ground, putting stuff in your mouth, viruses and bacteria come in, you form an antigen antibody complex…this is how your immune system is built.
“You don’t take a small child, put them in bubble-wrap in a room and say, ‘Go have a healthy immune system!’ This is Immunology/Microbiology 101.
“What I’m seeing is when you take human beings and you say, ‘Go into your house, clean all your counters, Lysol them down, you’re gonna kill 99% of viruses and bacteria, wear a mask, don’t go outside’ – what does it do?
“Our immune system is used to touching. We share bacteria; staphylococcus, streptococcal bacteria, viruses, we develop an immune response daily to this stuff. When you take that away from me, my immune system drops.
“As I shelter in place, my immune system drops. You keep me there for months, it drops more and now I’m at home, hand-washing, vigorously washing the counters, worried about things that I need to do to survive.
“When the child is in a womb, you’re in this protected environment. When you come out, you have almost no immune system. You develop that through touching your mouth, touching your eyes; bacterial virus immune response; IgG IgM. This is how you build a strong immune system.
“Sheltering in place decreases your immune system and then, as we all come out of shelter-in-place with a lower immune system and start trading viruses, bacteria – what do you think is going to happen? Disease is gonna spike and then you’ve got a disease spike amongst the hospital system – with furloughed doctors and nurses!
“This is not the combination want to set up for a healthy society, as your mask that you’re wearing for days, you touch the outside of it, COVID and then touch your mouth.
“This doesn’t make any sense. We wear masks in an acute setting, to protect us. We’re not wearing masks. Why is that? Because we understand microbiology. We understand immunology and we want strong immune systems.
“I don’t want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune system and then come out and get disease. We have both been in the ER, through Swine Flu and through Bird Flu. Did we shut down for those? Were they much less dangerous than COVID? Is the flu less dangerous than COVID?
“Let’s look at the death rates. No, it’s not. And what’s interesting to me, too is when someone dies in this country, right, now they’re not talking about the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the stroke. They say, ‘Did they die from COVID?’
“As you’ve been to hundreds of autopsies, you don’t talk about one thing, you talk about co-morbidities: their vessels were narrowed, their lungs were of a smoker. COVID was part of it. It is not the reason they died, folks. It is one of many reasons.
“So, to be so simplistic, to say that’s a ‘COVID death’, because they have COVID. You know how many people die with pneumonia or people that die from flu – with flu, I should say. It’s not from flu. Their lungs were compromised by COPD, they had a heart attack two years ago, they have a weakened body.
“We aren’t pressured to test for flu but ER doctors, my friends I talk to say, ‘You know, it’s interesting, when I’m writing up my death report, I’m being pressured to add COVID.’
“Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add COVID? To maybe increase the numbers and make it look a little bit worse than it is? I think so.
“When I look at the the basic tenets that we know of microbiology and I say, do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is emphatically, no. Do we need businesses to be shut down? Emphatically, no. Do we need to test them and get them back to work? Yes, we do.
“The secondary effects that we went over; the child abuse, alcoholism, loss of revenue – all these are, in our opinion a significantly more detrimental thing to society than a virus that has proven similar in nature to the seasonal flu we have every year.
“We need to make sure if you’re gonna dance on someone’s Constitutional Rights, you better have a good reason. You better have a really good, scientific reason and not just theory.
“One of the most important things that we need are our hospitals back up. We need our furloughed doctors back. We need our nurses back. Because, when we lift this thing, we’re gonna need all hands on deck.
“I know the local hospitals have closed two floors. Folks, that’s not the situation you want. We’re essentially setting ourselves up to have minimal staff and we’re going to have significant disease. That’s the wrong combination.
“I’ve been working with some of the leaders and I’ve talked to the head of the CDPH. I’ve gotten their opinion on this and a lot of the leaders in Sacramento and we’re all in agreement but we need to have Governor Newsom in agreement with us to lift this ban.
“I’ve talked to our local head of the health department and he’s waiting for that, even though they’re in agreement with me. They’re waiting for the powers that be to lift, because the data is showing us it’s time to lift. So, if we don’t lift, what is the reason?
“I can go into Sully’s right now, which I did this morning. There were 25 people in there and I can stand in line for 10 minutes but I can’t go in Café Rio and sit there for 10 minutes. Does that make sense to you guys?
“And I think I can go into Costco and I can shop with people and there’s probably a couple hundred people – but I can’t go in Café Rio. So, big businesses are open, little businesses are not. There’s no science behind that, as we’ve gone over – that is not science.
“There’s other factors in play, that we don’t have time to go into but it’s not science. I want to make that clear.”