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Non-Political Coronavirus Thread

Would it make sense that the primary reason besides treatment methods for a declining death rate would be a likely decreased initial viral load?

In February if the guy next to you was coughing up a lung you wouldn’t think twice about being indoors with him, now you’d get the hell outta dodge. People who are getting exposed now would be exposed from quicker interactions if they’re social distancing.
 
Something else about the death rate is that it can't be fully determined. According to multiple doctors I've seen, many of the people who get better will have Covid related issues for the rest of their lives. Some will lifelong lung issues.

This is another reason why even non-symptomatic people could be sicker than they know.
 
Rafi said:
Ha, now that would be good!

It’s based on a metric called the impact factor. All journals have them, and it’s how journals are compared. As one might expect, impact factors have flaws, but they can be somewhat helpful.

I had never heard of the journal this study is in, so I looked it up by impact factor and it’s #62 in the infectious disease category.
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I’m gonna take issue with criticizing a paper based on the impact factor of the journal. My most cited paper ever (98 citations) is in a journal with an impact factor of 0.5.

I am totally in favor of shitting on preprints and tearing a paper down for crappy methods. But there are plenty of reason to publish in a low impact journal that have nothing to do with quality of the work.
 
birdman said:
I’m gonna take issue with criticizing a paper based on the impact factor of the journal. My most cited paper ever (98 citations) is in a journal with an impact factor of 0.5.

I am totally in favor of shitting on preprints and tearing a paper down for crappy methods. But there are plenty of reason to publish in a low impact journal that have nothing to do with quality of the work.
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Yep, it’s just one starting point when reviewing an article. The impact factor is far from an end all be all. However, for a large clinical study, it certainly makes you wonder why it was in such a low impact journal, and after reviewing the article itself, I understand why.
 
ConnorEl said:
Death rates aren’t falling everywhere.
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This is true, and very important. We could end up with multiple situations across the country that look like the north east did. This is why I am happy to see the low death right now, but I certainly worry about it rising, and perhaps quickly, in the next month
 
For the doctors, how do they handle reporting long-term health issues and deaths?

Doctors are saying many of those who had Covid will suffer illnesses for the rest of their lives because of it.
 
RJKarl said:
For the doctors, how do they handle reporting long-term health issues and deaths?

Doctors are saying many of those who had Covid will suffer illnesses for the rest of their lives because of it.
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It’s pretty challenging. There will be studies that come out over the next 10 years tracking the outcomes of infected patients, but it is often difficult to directly tie symptoms and other conditions to an event years earlier.
 
A neighborhood near me has held a 4th of July parade for over 60 years. This year, the City of Charlotte denied their parade permit because of the virus. So they applied for, and received, a peaceful protest permit. The only difference is that the protest permit requires that they stop at stop signs. So I'll now be able to say I participated in the 2020 protests, plus I won't get the virus because it doesn't spread at protests, only parades. Happy birthday, America!
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
A neighborhood near me has held a 4th of July parade for over 60 years. This year, the City of Charlotte denied their parade permit because of the virus. So they applied for, and received, a peaceful protest permit. The only difference is that the protest permit requires that they stop at stop signs. So I'll now be able to say I participated in the 2020 protests, plus I won't get the virus because it doesn't spread at protests, only parades. Happy birthday, America!
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That is hysterical and is no doubt my laugh of the Day.
 
Yep, let's have a bunch of people who don't practice social distancing or masks get together today. That makes a lot of sense.
 
Wear a mask, 2&2.
 
birdman said:
I’m gonna take issue with criticizing a paper based on the impact factor of the journal. My most cited paper ever (98 citations) is in a journal with an impact factor of 0.5.

I am totally in favor of shitting on preprints and tearing a paper down for crappy methods. But there are plenty of reason to publish in a low impact journal that have nothing to do with quality of the work.
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This really isn’t the case for COVID. You have Nature level papers on N’s of 3-5. Put that in perspective and trust me (as an infectious disease researcher) that it is a HUGE red flag for a paper with these supposed findings to be published in that journal.

ETA: I have a paper that is going to get accepted in a much, much more prominent journal in which I took publicly available datasets from other COVID-19 papers and used them to show a specific molecular mechanism of inflammation spreads through the lungs and into the periphery driving the pathology of severe COVID-19. If a paper reanalyzing other data already published goes a good 4 tiers above where this article was published, well I think it is self explanatory.
 
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A truth that I think the media and public don't really understand and that the medical community hasn't really reckoned with is that the vast majority of published research is meaningless garbage. Everyone plays the game, because number of publications has been a primary measure in admissions and promotional criteria. So there's a huge incentive to publish any and everything you can cobble together, and new journals are constantly popping up to accommodate all the crappy research out there. It's not great for lots of reasons, and I think bad for medical education in general, but everyone sort of shrugs it off because the stakes are generally very low. Very few people are actually reading the work, the ones that do are usually those that know how the game works.

But with Covid research, all the sudden the stakes are higher. Now your crappy paper might get cited by the White House to justify some horrible policy that could legit hurt tons of people. And some of it is on the media for breathlessly reporting on research findings without really understanding the work or how it should be interpreted. But some is on researchers to understand and take some responsibility for what they publish and market, how it will be (mis) interpreted by the media/public, and be extremely clear in stressing the limitations of the work. Henry Ford's marketing department (which is almost certainly entirely unrelated to the authors of the work) should be ashamed, imo.
 
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That’s a good post.
 
BigTreeDeac said:
This really isn’t the case for COVID. You have Nature level papers on N’s of 3-5. Put that in perspective and trust me (as an infectious disease researcher) that it is a HUGE red flag for a paper with these supposed findings to be published in that journal.

ETA: I have a paper that is going to get accepted in a much, much more prominent journal in which I took publicly available datasets from other COVID-19 papers and used them to show a specific molecular mechanism of inflammation spreads through the lungs and into the periphery driving the pathology of severe COVID-19. If a paper reanalyzing other data already published goes a good 4 tiers above where this article was published, well I think it is self explanatory.
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Ok, but criticize the paper and it’s content, not the outlet. Unless it’s a pay to play predatory journal, there is really no reason to make the publication outlet your first line of attack on the quality of a research study.
 
birdman said:
Ok, but criticize the paper and it’s content, not the outlet. Unless it’s a pay to play predatory journal, there is really no reason to make the publication outlet your first line of attack on the quality of a research study.
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This is a pay-to-play open access journal. It costs $1750 to publish an article.
 
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