BC HEALTH
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

I do want to talk a bit about connections, conflicts and information during a pandemic. Since @fordnation insinuated I have COI which I don't, let's take a look at a single instance where @fordnation and Hospital for Sick Children are both making interesting decisions.

 Both share a powerful supporter in Peter Gilgan, who has been a great supporter of Sickkids

https://t.co/oL3pGiBny2
But his company, Mattamy Homes, has also substantially bankrolled Ontario Proud, which I have reason to believe pushed the Postmedia hit on my reputation.
Sickkids and Mattamy have very close ties. Here is Mary Federau, a longtime Sickkids exec who has moved to Mattamy but remains involved with the Sickkids foundation:
Mary's bio is too modest. It looks as though it has been scrubbed a bit over the last 72 hours. Here's the google cache from Jan 25:

https://t.co/DUk89IfHPU
Here's her more fulsome bio from a few days ago:
Mary Federau is the Executive Vice President of Mattamy Asset Management, the parent company of Mattamy Homes. Mary plays an integral role in setting direction and execution of the organization's overall strategies for long-term...
...growth, investment and operations across North America. She was appointed to this position in September 2018, after having served eight years as Chief Human Resources Officer for Mattamy Homes.
Mary is also Chair of the Peter Gilgan Foundation, which has contributed more than $300 million to a variety of worthy causes. [I guess 1/3 of that to her former employer]. Previous to joining Mattamy in 2010, Mary was the EVP Global Human Resources of MDS Inc...
an international life sciences company headquartered in Toronto. Prior to MDS, she held several executive roles at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, including SVP of Child Health Services (Operations), SVP of Corporate and Professional Services...
and Director of Strategic and Financial Planning. Mary holds an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business and was named one of Canada's Top 40-Under-40 in 1997. Mary has obtained the Chartered Director designation and currently serves on the board of the SickKids Foundation
and Good Shepherd Ministries in Toronto and is a member of the International Women's Forum.

She sounds like an impressive and good person. I am absolutely NOT suggesting any misdeeds on her part.
But given the oddness of Sickkids school guidance, the degree to which their reports seem very coordinated in both timing and message with government messaging, while simultaneously being at odds with some of the good guidance now being put out south of the border...
...I have wondered whether politics and the flow of donor money have politicized their messages.

Even more so having learned that Sickkids is pushing public messaging that lockdowns are harming child mental health, while sitting on data showing kids' mental health, according...
...to a number of different measures. They have the details...they can share them. That's a good news story. Why would you sit on that?

Again, I'm not accusing anyone of wrongdoing here. But if we're going to talk about transparency and who funds who, let's all do it, k?
Parenthetically, we can do this all day. At some point, thanks to friends who have helped me so much, I might. But I think this is a job for journalists, not epidemiologists.

Some very important conflict situations that exist are well known to journalists, and I realize...
...most outlets don't want to be perceived as doing smear jobs (leave that to Postmedia). But some of these relationships, whether monetary or romantic, probably are damaging our public discourse in a pandemic, and that literally kills people.
But as I say, that's your job, not mine.

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Does race/ethnicity belong in the first line of the patient

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Medical syntax is designed to communicate information in a predictable sequence with key elements prioritized to facilitate efficient communication and formation of an assessment and plan

2/

From preclinical lectures to Qbank questions to clerkship rotations, race/ethnicity was often prioritized in the same sentence as age + gender.

I grew accustomed to reading/hearing: a 70-year-old Black man w/ history of x, a 50-year-old Hispanic woman presented w/ y.

3/

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You gotta think about this one carefully!

Imagine you go to the doctor and get tested for a rare disease (only 1 in 10,000 people get it.)

The test is 99% effective in detecting both sick and healthy people.

Your test comes back positive.

Are you really sick? Explain below 👇

The most complete answer from every reply so far is from Dr. Lena. Thanks for taking the time and going through


You can get the answer using Bayes' theorem, but let's try to come up with it in a different —maybe more intuitive— way.

👇


Here is what we know:

- Out of 10,000 people, 1 is sick
- Out of 100 sick people, 99 test positive
- Out of 100 healthy people, 99 test negative

Assuming 1 million people take the test (including you):

- 100 of them are sick
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👇

Let's now test both groups, starting with the 100 people sick:

▫️ 99 of them will be diagnosed (correctly) as sick (99%)

▫️ 1 of them is going to be diagnosed (incorrectly) as healthy (1%)

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