This is astonishing silliness. There is ~literally no evidence~ that COVID-19 was spreading in Wuhan in Aug/Sept 2019 This whole thing is a HOT MESS 1/npic.twitter.com/SHQ2dxoGKW
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7/n Similarly, the vast increase in search terms for diarrhea only seems to start...well after the outbreak was officially acknowledgedpic.twitter.com/hDJPPgIXvy
8/n So, at face value, there doesn't really appear to be much going on here But it gets worse The authors make this statement, and reference this paper It's one of the foundational arguments of their paper - diarrhea is a major symptom of COVID-19pic.twitter.com/6Dv3x8hIpd
9/n But if you actually follow that link and check the paper out, you'll find that it showed that 35/204 COVID-19 patients had diarrhea, which is about 17%https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32287140/
10/n More broadly, the current best evidence suggests that diarrhea is a RARE symptom of COVID-19, which makes tracking internet search terms for it a bit...problematicpic.twitter.com/sTKwz7jTot
11/n It's also worth noting that these are really just vague correlations - there are SO MANY THINGS that could cause a few more cars in a select group of hospital parking lots and a few dozen extra queries about diarrhea on Baidu
12/n It's hard to know what to make of the paper really, because all the authors are doing is drawing incredibly vague correlations and then suggesting a very unlikely outcome from them Not great, that
13/n Really, what this study shows is that if you have enough time you can correlate basically anything It's definitely not proof of much
14/n I'd say that the correlations found at Tyler Vigen's website are more likely to be accurate reflections of the truth than these very cursory connections https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations …
I'd want to see the inter-annual variability over a few more years as well. Comparing two years for this purpose is rank stupidity. Maybe it was colder or hotter, what about car accident stats, or ... with two data points (year x and year y) you can correlate anything.
If this were during host adaptation, modest magnitude would not be so unexpected. Then the explosion of cases would appear later in the autumn, from a potent strain. Right? That being said, the study still looks like rubbish for the other reasons.
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