The Only COVID Hospitalization Account I've Seen

The only detailed account of a COVID hospitalization I've found is by a YouTuber in the Bakersfield, CA area named Mark Clay McGowan. McGowan is a retired railroader who normally posts on railroad subjects and local history, and he's a bit of a cousin in style to Mike Rowe. I followed him for that reason. However, on November 18, he put up a YouTube post from his hospital bed explaining that over the prior weekend, he'd been to the ER, diagnosed with viral pnseumonia and sent home.

But the following Monday, his family, feeling he'd worsened, took him back to the ER, where he was diagnosed with COVID and admitted. He's been in the hospital ever since, posting YouTubes of his experience avery few weeks. I tried to link his November 18 post directly here, but YouTube won't let me do it. It is in fact harrowing. Above is a screen shot, and if you have the fortitude, you can watch the whole thing via this link.

I've been hesitant to post on this, because under US law, medical informaion is highly confidential, but my view at this point is that by posting on YouTube, McGowan is making his information public on his own initiative, and there is some real value to having it. Almost no specific information on any individual COVID hospitalization, or indeed any general information on the course of such hospitalizations, is available anywhere. Since COVID left China probably more than a year ago, it's remarkable how little useful information about it has been made public. I suspect there's a certain Mike Rowe part of McGowan's makeup that's urging him to do this.

McGowan in the video linked above exhibited what are reported as symptoms of infection that would in fact warrant a visit to the ER, fever, dry cough, weakness, and confusion. However, even people who are hospitalized with those symptoms are released after a fairly short period -- the case mortality rate is generally about 1% now in the US. As of today, the cumulative case mortality rate in Kern County, CA, where McGowan is hospitalized, is .7 of 1% -- and Kern is considered a major hot spot.

So a big mystery to me is why McGowan seems to have shown little improvement over six weeks in the hospital. His most recent YouTube post indicates he has trouble breathing and is so weak he can't stand up to let the nurses change his bed sheets. He says his blood oxygen is around 90%, which is borderline fatal. But clearly only a very small percentage of COVID patients reach such a dire condition.

I went looking for web references on COVID and blood oxygen and found a study, remarkable in that it exists at all, as well as in what it contains. The study dicusses several cases of patients diagnosed with COVID who have serious comorbidities, including heart disease and multiple organ transplants, who have blood oxygen levels well below 90%, which would normally be fatal, but they're awake and chattering on their cell phones.

The Wall Street Journal considers it a medical mystery as to why “large numbers of Covid-19 patients arrive at hospitals with blood-oxygen levels so low they should be unconscious or on the verge of organ failure. Instead they are awake, talking—not struggling to breathe” (1). Science judges the lack of patient discomfort at extraordinarily low blood-oxygen concentrations as defying basic biology (2). Writing in The New York Times, Dr. Levitan, with 30 years of emergency medicine experience, notes “A vast majority of Covid pneumonia patients I met had remarkably low oxygen saturations at triage—seemingly incompatible with life—but they were using their cellphones . . . they had relatively minimal apparent distress, despite dangerously low oxygen levels” (3). Despite this extensive coverage in the news media, the topic has not been addressed in medical journals.

Yet McGowan, by his account, has COVID, but his blood oxygen is behaving normally. Low blood oxygen is more typically a result of other COPD disease like emphysema. Whether McGowan has also been diagnosed with this he doesn't mention. I wish him the best, no matter what, and I'm sorry he hasn't been posting YouTubes about trains.

But this rasies a bigger question, which the quote carefully and obliquely raises as well: COVID has been around for a year, but the public health community seems to show little curiosity about it, and it in fact pretty much insists that the models are all we need to understand it. This is looking to me more and more like a dereliction.

In fact, with a lifetime's experience of institutional dysfunction behind me, I would say that there are major disincentives to serous COVID research. Even a relatively innocuous study like the one I linked above is likely to raise questions that undermine the public consensus promoted by the Drs Fauci and Birx and the public health establishment. There likely won't be serious grant money, and it could be dangerous to careers. Now and then we see reports of doctors losing their licenses for saying the wrong thing about COVID.

I'm beginning to think this may be a bigger problem than the disease itself.