2/n The study is here: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42669767 … It is...not great
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3/n Basically, the authors looked at internet search trends for "cough" and "diarrhea" and some satellite photos of hospital parking lots, and concluded that higher-than-usual activity began BEFORE the COVID-19 outbreak officially happened Thus, COVID-19 started early!pic.twitter.com/TmFk49AEsp
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4/n This has spurred conspiracist fools (and some media sites...ahem) to declare that the Chinese government is hiding data, because obviously this ROBUST SCIENCE has proven things
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5/n But even THE MOST CURSORY EXAMINATION of the paper reveals that it is pretty hugely flawed Firstly, the magnitude of the findings How much higher was the activity in these hospital parking lots?
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6/n If you look at the regression curve, you can see that this huge increase in activity was actually not that impressive. It's a touch higher than the baseline, but not orders of magnitude biggerpic.twitter.com/ImrJX1l1Jm
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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
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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
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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/
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 …
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