Wow. Yet another ecological paper on COVID-19 that appears to have some astonishing flaws Let's do a bit of peer-review on twitter 1/nhttps://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1331959052016947201 …
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12/n Simply comparing COVID-19 death rates at the national level with some population-level indicators is a pretty pointless thing to do no matter how you do itpic.twitter.com/IKQkpgFZbU
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13/n What possible meaning can you garner from the fact that the latitude of the barycenter of some countries correlates with their COVID-19 death toll as of August 31st?
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14/n Even worse, the authors made no attempt to control for the age distribution of those infected in the population, which as we know very well by now is the biggest defining factor in the death rate from COVID-19
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15/n Also, the authors note that reverse causality may be an issue when interpreting the correlation between COVID-19 deaths and economic intervention, but don't make this point for the stringency index even though it's probably exactly as problematicpic.twitter.com/HTc3sr4dId
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16/n Also, the fact that the authors call this "the least uncertain" data is pretty wild, because a) it isn't and b) the least uncertain sources are TERRIBLE for many countries so WHY USE THEM AT ALL????pic.twitter.com/EaRFI0TcSK
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17/n Ultimately, I cannot see how you can take home anything from this research aside from the fact that some country-level measures recorded years ago correlate well with COVID-19 deaths and some don't
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18/n I feel like
@TylerVigen should create a new version of the Spurious Correlations website with COVID-19 deaths so that people can see just how pointless all of these ecological studies really areShow this thread
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Could you walk through the ecological fallacy in this case? I understand the concept generally but how do we explain it’s application here?
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Basically that country-level indicators like obesity rates from 2012 may have no bearing on the people who actually caught covid and died in each place
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It was a *statistical* analysis with lots of data. Your "ecological fallacy" argument might apply for Australia, but most likely it would disappear when considering all countries. Yeah, still not a huge dataset, but pretty big.
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The fact that they ran some Pearson correlations and a principal components analysis makes absolutely no difference in the fundamental weaknesses of the study
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