A study recently made massive, international news for reportedly showing that normal glasses may protect against COVID-19 Let's do a brief peer-review on twitter, because this is wild 1/npic.twitter.com/T94hRFvfXU
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5/n Another way of doing this research would be to look at people who have caught COVID-19, and another group who haven't, and compare them in terms of the proportion who wear glasses This is called a case-control study, and is what these researchers appear to have donepic.twitter.com/yn6yCxsm1Q
6/n Essentially, the cases (COVID-19 patients) wore glasses less than controls (non-COVID-19 patients), which might indicate that glasses prevented COVID-19 infection So far so good, right?
7/n Well, there are a few immediate and obvious snags Snag 1: small sample size. We have <300 cases and no information on controls. That's weird, and problematic (usually these studies are much bigger)pic.twitter.com/XlgaAoXkB8
8/n Snag 2: The outcome measure isn't wearing glasses. The study actually appears to compare short-sightedness percentages between the cases and controls, which is an obviously imperfect measurepic.twitter.com/16EPba7jxB
9/n (It's imperfect because not everyone who wears glasses is myopic and not everyone who is myopic wears glasses >8hrs per day)
10/n But then we hit the biggest snag of all The control population You see, the authors didn't actually collect a control sample. The rate of myopia here is from ANOTHER STUDY ENTIRELYpic.twitter.com/YH4f5BlDBK
11/n Not only that, but the study was conducted IN 1987 and the extrapolation is just weirdly moved forward from then This makes NO SENSE AT ALLpic.twitter.com/2RpQyPbyhY
12/n I honestly don't know what to say here. They're comparing the rate of myopia in a group of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 to the research findings of physical fitness of students from 1987 You can't draw any meaning from that!
13/n These two groups are so wildly different that it's entirely impossible to say whether the glasses had the slightest impact on anything at all, it's just very strange speculation
14/n Maybe glasses DO prevent COVID-19 transmission, but based on this research we have absolutely no idea if that's true
15/n The ABSOLUTE BEST you can say from this research is that it appears that fewer patients diagnosed with COVID-19 from a single hospital in Hubei had myopia than some high-school students in '87 It's not even about glasses!
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