Greenwich Time does its best to whip up fear
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16% in CT nursing homes on respiratory care
The first indication of coronavirus community spread was in a Washington state nursing home.
In Connecticut, we’ve seen older people more at risk for being hospitalized once they contract the virus, and it’s not a surprise.
According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 16 percent of the state’s 22,653 nursing home residents are already receiving respiratory care.
Wow, that’s a lot! 16% of 22,653 is 3,624 old people on respirators (and0.48 of another one, but we’ll ignore her). But in the same paper, though not in this article, is a report that CT presently has 415 known cases of Kung Flu, out of 45,000 people tested.
Yes, of course, a reader can put these two disparate articles together and see that the real number of elderly patients on respirators because of the Chinese Virus is not anything close to 3,624. The point is, Greenwich Time deliberately drafted its headline to create that impression.
And “respiratory care” itself is undefined in the article. There’s a huge difference between a respirator and a ventilator: one is a paper mask, the other is a machine that breaths for a patient. So how many of these patients are on one or the other? Neither the headline nor the article itself says, probably because the cub reporter on the job doesn’t know that the two are distinct.
Medical ventilators are sometimes colloquially called "respirators", a term stemming from commonly used devices in the 1950s (particularly the "Bird Respirator"). However, in modern hospital and medical terminology, these machines are never referred to as respirators, and use of "respirator" in this context is now a deprecated anachronism signaling technical unfamiliarity. In the present-day medical field, the word "respirator" refers to a protective face mask.
