How would you like to be laughed at by a sitting Santa Barbara County supervisor? No, not in private, silly. In the middle of a public meeting. Sounds awesome, right?
Wrong. Santa Barbara County Public Health Officer Dr. Henning Ansorg certainly didn’t like it when 4th District Supervisor Peter Adam laughed at him on Dec. 15. As Ansorg was describing that false positives range between zero and 4 percent for a certain type of COVID-19 test, and that with the percentage of COVID-19 positive tests in Santa Barbara County, the potential false positives are negligible, Adam basically laughed in his face.
How rude!
“Why are you laughing, sir? What is so funny about that?” Ansorg said rather tersely.
“Well, it just seems to me that if you a test that works, it works, and it should work … ,” Adam responded with additional chuckles.
Maybe my sense of humor is way off, but what’s funny about that?
“Yes, it does work, really well, sir,” Ansorg basically yelled.
Wow! Another spicy exchange with Peter “I Have A Point To Make” Adam.
“I don’t like to be ridiculed, sir,” Ansorg said.
“I am not ridiculing you,” Adam said.
Actually, you weren’t just ridiculing him, Adam, you were also being condescending about a topic you’re most definitely not an expert on. Because reading stuff on the internet does not an expert make. No matter what the internet tells you!
But just to humor our pal Peter “The COVID-19 Questioner” Adam, let’s do a little bit of math. Just the other day, Santa Barbara County recorded 360 positive COVID-19 cases. Wowee! That’s a lot. It’s actually the most daily cases ever recorded in the county!
If 4 percent of those were false positives, the county would still have at least 340 positive cases. Even if the worst case scenario outlier of 16 percent false positives were a peer-reviewed scientific fact, the county would still have recorded more than 300 positive COVID-19 cases in one day! And COVID-19 hospitalizations would still be rising.
So what’s your point, Adam? That the science isn’t 100 percent?
News flash: Science is never 100 percent. It’s based on probabilities and likelihood. It’s always been that way. And guess what? If it’s 96 percent likely that you’re going to have a heart attack unless you do something about it, you’re going to believe the doctor and start doing the things that are likely to help you not have a heart attack.
Because preventative measures are likely to give people a longer life.
What does the Santa Barbara County Department of Public Health get out of shutting down the economy? Other than being hated, publicly ridiculed, threatened, blamed for economic collapse, etc. Sounds great!
What does the county get out of leaning on science and trying to prevent a public health catastrophe? Hopefully, a world in which doctors don’t have to make a decision about who to treat and who to let die because they’ve run out of room at the hospital.
Which is an unfortunate reality in some places in the United States—and a reality the state of California is trying desperately to prevent. It sucks. And that I can tell you with 100 percent confidence.
The Canary is ready for ridicule. Send laughs to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 17-24, 2020.
