4 ms·
Excel spreadsheet dropped contact tracing rows leading to 1500 additional deaths
- mrfusion 6y agoI flagged this because the headline seems hyperbolic. Reminds me of how companies count piracy as lost sales.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tazjin 6y agoI flagged it, too, because them calling this a "conservative estimate" makes it very likely that this is on the standard level of the COVID-related junk science. Edit: I was trying to dive deeper to call this out more specifically, but can't get over this quote in the introduction: > e.g., because they don’t take contact tracers seriously, distrust the government, are afraid of scams, social stigma, or have other privacy and cybersecurity concerns If these really are the reasons why you think people refused to participate in contact tracing schemes, you're probably too far removed from other parts of the population to make predictions about their behaviour.
- theptip 6y agoIs there something in the paper that you’re critiquing? This would be the equivalent of a quasi-random experiment where say Pirate Bay went down in <county x> and you observed a change of Y% in sales. (It’s not equivalent to just pulling a number out of the air for what you think the drop in sales is). As in, it’s not trying to infer causation from correlation, or substitute one thing for another, it’s using a natural/random discontinuity as a stand-in for an intervention.