14/n We know that the lag between policy introduction, implementation, and outcome is not immediate, and this is likely to vary by country, so simply comparing them day-by-day as this paper appears to doesn't really give us any indication of their impact
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15/n Furthermore, the lrNPIs themselves are really poorly elucidated. This is FAR from a fair summation of the complex and detailed work South Korea put in to controlling COVID-19!pic.twitter.com/razBpmmN8h
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16/n I mean, reading the paper you might get the impression that all South Korea did was some optional social distancing, emergency declaration, and case quarantine, rather than a coordinated and multi-step approach including HUGE healthcare investment
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17/n There's also not much effort to disentangle the complexities of the marginal benefit of each intervention, unlike previous research. It's likely, for example, that closing schools in Sweden (that did little else) had a huge impact...
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18/n ...but that this was not as effective as in Italy, which had many interventions
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19/n The authors also use some fairly inappropriate causal language throughout. These are the potential benefits ASSOCIATED WITH the announcement of policies in each place, we certainly can't infer a causal impact herepic.twitter.com/RXGpCijYlD
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20/n In other words, there are innumerable confounding factors that may have made the interventions more/less effective, like the age structure of the population, how socially distanced they were pre-pandemic etc...
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21/n At best, this study provides us with some evidence that mrNPIs are not associated with a large marginal benefit in terms of case numbers over lnNPIs, when comparing a tiny group of dissimilar nations
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22/n More realistically, I think we can probably say that the paper tells us little useful except that analysing the impact of NPIs generally is extremely hard
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23/n This is a bit of a shame, because I actually agree wholeheartedly with the authors that there is a cost to restrictive NPIs, and the marginal benefit of (say) stay-at-home orders is likely to be quite small in many circumstances
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24/n That being said, this paper just doesn't tell us anything useful about these mrNPIs beyond some more very vague evidence that they may not be as beneficial on top of other interventions (maybe)
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25/n Ultimately, the authors may have failed to find a benefit of business closures or stay-at-home orders, but the methodology used just doesn't give us enough information to say much, if anything, conclusivelypic.twitter.com/0yrwOfkA4q
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Health Nerd Retweeted Andreas Backhaus
26/n Some more issues with the study, which gets worse and worse the more you look at it!https://twitter.com/AndreasShrugged/status/1349464781145731073?s=20 …
Health Nerd added,
Andreas Backhaus @AndreasShruggedThere's a new paper by John Ioannidis and co-authors that's intended to push their anti-lockdown message by performing a flimsy empirical analysis. Adding to@GidMK's thread, I will just highlight one flaw that should have prevented this paper from being published but hasn't. pic.twitter.com/nn6MKQd96lShow this thread16 replies 12 retweets 92 likesShow this thread
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