US: POSSIBLE REASON FOR COVID-19 DEATH TOLL IN PEOPLE OF COLOR IS FAULTY OXYGEN READINGS

Tue 05 July 2022:

On Saturday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) acknowledges that problems with devices it approved to detect blood oxygen levels may be one of the reasons why doctors occasionally fail to identify serious cases of COVID-19 among people of color, Politico reports.

“Pulse oximeters can overestimate blood oxygen in people with dark skin, causing doctors to miss patients’ distress signals,” said the report.

The FDA is convening an expert advisory panel later this year to assess the problem and offer guidance to health care providers. An agency spokesperson said it has prioritized assuring that pulse oximeters are “sufficiently safe and accurate for all people,” according to the report.

“But advocates still say the FDA, which issued a warning about the issue last year, is moving too slowly,” said the report.

The problem raises broader concerns about bias as technology becomes more embedded in health care, and about the government’s ability to counteract it through regulation and oversight, it added.

New Study

Pulse oximeter devices, a common tool used to guide medical decision-making in COVID-19 patients, overestimated the blood oxygen levels in nonwhite patients with COVID-19 and made them appear healthier than they actually were, according to a new study published May 31 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

These findings add to the growing body of evidence about pulse oximetry inaccuracies in people of color, says the study’s co-lead author Ashraf Fawzy, MD, MPH, an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Our research is the first to show that the overestimation of oxygen saturation among Black and Hispanic patients led to a delayed recognition of the need for COVID-19 therapy compared with white patients,” says Dr. Fawzy.

That’s because oxygen saturation levels are often used to determine whether or not certain more aggressive COVID-19 medications are used, as some treatments are only recommended for people whose oxygen saturation levels have dropped below a certain threshold. The consequences of these inaccuracies — failure to receive appropriate treatment or delays in treatment — should be examined as potential explanations for disparities in COVID-19 outcomes, according to the authors.

Black and Hispanic people are 70 percent and 80 percent more likely to die of COVID-19 than white people, respectively, according to an April 2022 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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