know your body. know your symptom profile. if you re developing a head cold, if you have a sore throat, get tested, get tested before you travel. i d like i tell all my patients and anybody that asks, if you haven t already in the last 20 months, get an oximeter, and speak to your provider if you have any of those symptoms because we re going to soon have oral antivirals so really nobody should die from this pandemic, because we have great tools, both vaccines and therapeutics. that s the 2021 stocking stuffer, that little thing. i want to ask if there s any size that s too big. because i think people feel that there are mixed messages. so there s no limit to the size of a gathering, maskless and indoors, for thanksgiving. why aren t we all back in the office? well, you know, that s a great point here, and you can congregate back in the office. we re seeing some companies actually do that, nicole. apple is going to do it in february. i disagree with it because i think psychologic
shortness of breath, racing pulse and dizziness and they ve ended up needing hospital treatment and doctors that i ve spoken to have also come across cases of patients they ve been treating in intensive care who have had their oxygen levels measured with an oximeter as well as using bull, blood gas samples and there has been a discrepancy between the two readings so higher or normal readings coming from the oximeter but lower or more accurate readings from the blood sample. now, we know that people from black, asian and minority ethnic communities are more likely to get coronavirus and become severely unwell and die from it and medical experts are now also the health secretary believe that potential inaccuracies in these devices may be a contributing factor to this because if oxygen levels and is detected in time, if low oxygen levels aren t detected in time and weather delays in people receiving treatment then this could have
was a significant discrepancy. how significant a discrepancy in health terms? so, for a white patient in general, when the pulse oximeter is reading on a normal range, say 92% to 96%, it is inaccurately reading maybe 3% of the time, so that s pretty low, so most of the time it s very accurate but in our study we found that same thing was happening getting closer to 12% of the time, so maybe one in ten times which, again, doesn t sound like that much but when you consider how often these devices are being used and how critical this information is, that means that at least twice as often, perhaps three times as often, the device is less accurate in black patients. so how do you resolve this discrepancy or these discrepancies, then, particularly the fact that it could mean the difference
fester, bias in medical technologies. thank you very muc joining fester, thank you very much for joining us. just tell it a little bit about your research and why he conducted it. it is bit about your research and why he conducted it conducted it. it is a pleasure to be here. conducted it. it is a pleasure to be here- this conducted it. it is a pleasure to be here. this research conducted it. it is a pleasure to be here. this research came - conducted it. it is a pleasure to be here. this research came from - conducted it. it is a pleasure to bej here. this research came from the covid i9 pandemic. i am a practising pulmonary physician and during a pandemic when caring for certain patients we notice the pulse oximeter seem to be less accurate when we looked at the more accurate lavatory test called arterial blood gas that we don t perform as often. we saw that there seem to be this discrepancy and we didn t quite understand why so we looked at, you know, skin tone is a factor and
the short term question here is whether we can stay free from further covid restrictions. dan johnson, bbc news. let s stay with that concern over pulse oximeters, mentioned in danjohson s report. dr michael sjoding is from the university of michigan. he led research on racial bias in pulse oximetry measurement last year, finding a critical need to understand and correct racial bias in medical technologies. he told me more about his findings. this research came from the covid pandemic. i am a practising pulmonary physician and during the pandemic when caring for certain patients we noticed the pulse oximeter seemed to be less accurate when we looked at a more accurate labatory test called arterial blood gas that we don t perform as often. we saw that there seemed to be this discrepancy and we didn t quite understand why so we looked at, you know, skin tone as a factor and we looked at black patients compared to white patients and we found that there