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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2/n Paper is here. Basically, the authors took total COVID-19 mortality in a range of countries by August 31st and correlated them with country-level metrics such as average BMIhttps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full …
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3/n The authors found that country-level metrics compiled by the University of Oxford on the stringency of lockdowns did not correlate well with the number of deaths that a country experienced from COVID-19, but other things like BMI and latitude didpic.twitter.com/amAnWP1Mjl
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4/n But even a very shallow skim of the methodology brings up extremely serious concerns For example, where did they get their data?
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5/n Well, the obesity rates were taken from the CIA Factbook This is manifestly inappropriate. The factbook was last updated in 2016 for these figures and mostly references reports that are 6+ YEARS oldpic.twitter.com/nWGQSW7k3l
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6/n I'm not sure what meaning we could take from correlating COVID-19 deaths in August with obesity rates from 2012, but it's certainly not a lot
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Replying to @GidMK
Eh shouldn't you prove here that the obesity rates in 2012 have no relation to those in 2020? If I had to guess the obesity in 2020 if anything would be worse for that country than in 2012, not any better.
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Nope, because what we care about is not the exact number but the relationships between those numbers and the deaths. The correlation would change if the ratios of obesity rates change over time (which they do)
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