COVID-19 sufferers with darker skin died at higher rates than lighter-skinned patients during the height of the pandemic, and now two Black doctors are presenting evidence about one factor that could have contributed to that disparity. Doctors Stephanie Brown and Noha Aboelata say in a study published last August the pulse oximeter is biased.
“The technology itself appears to be flawed and does not take into account skin tone,” Aboelata told Bay Area TV station KGO last month.
The pulse oximeter measures a person’s blood oxygen level, a key measurement when determining COVID-19 treatment. The device is usually placed on a fingertip. It uses light beams to estimate the oxygen saturation of the blood and the pulse rate.
“The oxygen reading in the blood determines your treatment trajectory for COVID,” Dr. Brown said.
“Total cumulative data show that Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander people have experienced higher rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths than white people when data are adjusted to account for differences in age by race and ethnicity,” the Kaiser Family Foundation reported.
“We felt like something else had to be happening, since whites with diabetes and kidney disease, for example, were experiencing lower rates of death and disease severity than Blacks even when they had the same clinical risk factors,” Brown said.
In December 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine was among the first to refocus the spotlight on issues with the pulse oximeter to a new generation of medical researchers, although Brown said research into the device’s accuracy goes back 30 years.
“Questions about pulse oximeter technology have been raised, given its original development in populations that were not racially diverse,” the study said.
Johns Hopkins University medical student, Joel Bervell, focused on the faulty device in a
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