Spotting Quality Scientific Journalism in the Time of COVID
I hate to link to a story that I think is at best unhelpful and possibly bogus, but the following article, and others like it, came at me from a couple different directions today: “Antibody Study.” I am linking to it because I would like to use it as a tool to discuss how to read news about scientific research.
A Big Red Flag is Hypothesis Before Data
Read the following quote from the article.
The team tested 3,200 people at three Bay Area locations on Saturday using an antibody test for COVID-19 and expect to release results in the coming weeks. The data could help to prove COVID-19 arrived undetected in California much earlier than previously thought.
This quote says that they’re not showing you any data, but then proceeds to tell you what they expect to see from the data that you’re not seeing. Big red flag. Scientists are well aware of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when people see what they want to see. This happens both in life and for scientists in data. This is such a well known fact that the scientific community has put into place a peer review process, so that people not associated with the research can say “Yes, I too can conclude from your data that your hypothesis was right.” Peer reviewers don’t just look at your data, they also look at your process and affirm that too.
The Risk is Complacency
The herd immunity mentioned in this article begins to make it sound like we could all come out of social distancing very soon. Unfortunately, the Bay Area’s epidemic still has a doubling time. See the growth curves in Bay Areas Case Counts. This means that the virus is currently doubling and doubling again, inexorably. It is great that the Bay Area epidemic is growing more slowly than other regions. That has given us more time, but we still need to take action. Our community is not out of the woods.
We are all looking for good news.
It pays to be pessimistic in a pandemic. See Humans think linearly. I know we all want to think that there’s some magic bullet that will get us and our community out of this mess. Eventually there will be, but it will come with a lot of effort and a lot of good scientific work.
Why has the Bay Area been relatively blessed?
At the core of this article, there is an interesting question. Ever since I came back from North Carolina in mid March, I was wondering why San Francisco had a slower growth rate than many other regions in the US. I think a big part of this is due to leadership at the regional level and corporate level. Big companies like Google started social distancing well before it was mandated. Our regional governments started social distancing well before other regions. I was also wondering whether a factor like the temperature had something to do with it, but I haven’t seen any solid data that explains why.
I am skeptical that COVID-19 was here this past fall.
For herd immunity to have built up in the fall, from spread of COVID-19, then it would had to have been very widespread. If it was that widespread, and as lethal as it currently is, then we would have seen surges in deaths at nursing homes just like happened in Seattle. If you find me a slew of unexplained deaths in nursing homes from this past fall, then I’ll put some credence in the possible arrival of COVID-19 months before it was ever reported in China.
Until then, I’m sorry to say, I don’t believe you.