4 ms·
This is another irresponsible headline. I cannot read the article, so correct me if I am wrong, but if what others said is true... It was not random because t
by wtvanhest 6y ago
This is another irresponsible headline.
I cannot read the article, so correct me if I am wrong, but if what others said is true...
It was not random because they didn't randomly select people, they let people self-select!
If they gave the total number of people who took the test, and total number of people asked, you could at least get a range.
Of course, that range would still be biased to people who are walking around during a time when they should be sheltering in place.
At best, 30% of people who were offered a covid antibody test in public had antibodies.
I think its safe to say that journalists have a responsibility to get the headlines right on this topic or they risk causing a lot of people to make bad decisions after hearing that 30% of people already have this disease. There is a real human cost of this click-bait, and it will be deaths.
- fortran77 6y agoThis is a strong response from someone who claims not to have read the article.
- retsibsi 6y agoIs it wrong, though? I did read the article, and I don't think so. One relevant thing GP may have missed is that the researchers "excluded anyone who had tested positive for the virus in the standard nasal swab test". So they weren't quite trying to directly estimate the proportion of people with antibodies, but the proportion of people without a positive test with antibodies. But I suspect this didn't change the results much: how many people in the area have tested positive and recovered sufficiently to be out in public?