
Covid-19 Sanity – Covid-19 papers from bioRxiv/medRxiv searchable and sortable - hardmaru
http://biomed-sanity.com
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Jovensa555
[https://projecteve.com/organizing-tech-tools-for-
work/#comme...](https://projecteve.com/organizing-tech-tools-for-
work/#comment-586225)

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Jovensa
[https://projecteve.com/organizing-tech-tools-for-
work/#comme...](https://projecteve.com/organizing-tech-tools-for-
work/#comment-586225)

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rubidium
Ask HN: Has any study been done doing a random sampling of a population using
an antibody immunity test? It seems the natural next step given we have such a
test.

Until we do that, I feel like we have no idea of the actual infection rate and
population immunity.

~~~
phaemon
As an alternative point of view: who cares?

We know for a fact that ICUs are being overloaded with cases and morgues are
overwhelmed with the dead. Arguing over exact figures is like quibbling over
your exact velocity as you're falling off a cliff.

Finding some prettier numbers won't change the reality of the situation, no
matter how convincingly you argue your case.

~~~
vikramkr
3 blue one brown had a great video on exponential growth that detailed how a
10% difference in the numbers is the difference between being halfway there
and having orders of magnitude to go.

As I'm sure you're aware, the point of the numbers isn't to change the reality
of the situation, it's to understand what that reality is. And the people that
care are epidemiologists and leaders with decades of experience fighting
pandemic after pandemic. You know, people that know what they're talking
about? Might be worth trying to spend time actually learning how the people
that are spending day and night trying to save your life and the lives of your
loved ones do their work before dismissing them as useless.

[https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg](https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg)

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gregwebs
There's some useful paper discussion on
[https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/)

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mkolodny
Nice! I think adding upvoting HN-style would help with the sorting.

Edit: And HN-style comments might make it easier to discuss the papers.

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fsh
I think that a reddit/hn-style voting system is the absolute opposite of what
you want to have for scientific publications. These systems tend to enforce a
strong hive-mind, where only the most popular posts and opinions are visible
and anything else gets downvoted into oblivion.

~~~
leetcrew
don't citations already function like a voting system (albeit with no
downvotes)? a paper with zero citations will be ignored just as surely as a
comment in a large thread with zero votes.

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datnoblesavage
[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2018.0008...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2018.00084/full)

~~~
cowsandmilk
Any context here? The only apparent relation is that this paper is also about
viruses.

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mandy12xx
any good source on the tfidf exemplar svm model that was used for this?

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omgJustTest
THanks for these. I am interested in modeling this effort, and it is difficult
to find papers that outright call R00, population logistic saturation
parameters, case resolution timescale, detection probabilities (ie if you have
x tests per million ppl, what is the actual number of cases), etc.

R00 that I typically use is about 2.1-2.6, however relating this to the 30-60%
case increase per day is a difficult task.

If you know more information about where I could find these I would appreciate
it.

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AshamedCaptain
Why would you even do this?

On the days where I was still energetic enough to try and debunk some of the
pseudosciences, I quickly discovered that one of the primary rules is
absolutely never to trust one single article, however "scientific", and
however reputable the publisher of the journal/conference is.

Otherwise one quickly becomes overwhelmed by the amount of crap published by
otherwise "respectable" publishers (e.g. Elsevier's Journal of Homeopathy).
Let's not even get into non-reviewed articles...

The only things that _may_ have any value whatsoever are the ones published in
utmost respectable _journals_ themselves (e.g. Nature, but absolutely not on
any of their spinoffs), and/or when there are very big labs/organizations in
the authors list. Very big. I mean usually national pharmaceutical
associations (obviously not from all states) or huge corporations (who will
generally avoid putting their name on the line either way).

Meta-analyses most importantly do NOT have any intrinsinc value either _just
because_ they are meta-analyses.

By reading bioXiv directly, you are most likely doing yourself a disservice.
Unless you are a state agency or huge corporation having huge resources
backing your which allows you to internally replicate whatever they claim.

~~~
whatshisface
You're going too far in dismissing the value of individual scientific papers.
If you read the methods and analysis yourself you can figure out how good
their results are. If you read a lot of papers or read several meta-analyses
you can form a opinion about what the consensus is. All of these options are
more work than reading one abstract and calling it a day but that doesn't mean
scientific papers are worthless.

If scientific papers did not contain any information then scientists would not
read them.

~~~
AshamedCaptain
No, you cannot figure out by yourself "how good the results are". That is the
one of the critical points. The paper might even pass peer review and get
accepted -- which, assuming a reasonable quality journal, means that the
methods and analysis they claim make sense.

But that is just the _very minimum_ you can expect in an article. Incredibly
enough, by itself, that is already a huge filter. But sadly that is nowhere
near enough to give any value whatsoever to the article. i.e. the article can
be perfect and still just wrong. Even assuming good faith from the authors,
they could just be the lucky 5% who got a positive out of an impossible thing
and decided to publish. In a world with a general pressure to publish positive
results and specially in a highly-hyped topic such as this one, you have a
very high chance of seeing such a result.

At the end of the day this is the only argument I have left to debunk some
homeopathy papers.

Scientists who are in a position where they have the resources to _reproduce_
the articles should and do read them. "Mortals" are not and reading these
articles is a waste of time and potentially a disservice.

There are tens of journals claiming _utter non-sense_ being published every
single month.

Using un-reviewed papers to estimate "consensus" is also pointless. Using
publication numbers / citations / impact factors is slightly better but also
extremely dangerous. If anything pseudo-science chaps are good at is at
publishing large numbers of astonishing crap.

The sad truth is that filtering good science vs not is out of reach for the
average layman, which leaves you with unscientific stuff such as "reputation"
as your only tool.

~~~
whatshisface
I think you might want to qualify that by specific fields. For example if the
paper you're reading is math or theoretical physics, then you actually do have
all of the same capabilities as the author to verify it. As for publication
bias, some studies are pre-registered.

> _Scientists who are in a position where they have the resources to
> _reproduce_ the articles should and do read them._

It is typical for a scientist to read hundreds and hundreds of papers every
year, or sometimes even every month. Are you suggesting that they reproduce
every one of them? You may be dismayed to find out that typically, they would
reproduce none of them, and when the system is working its best they might
reproduce one of them. Under usual circumstances, you and they have exactly
the same replication ability: the ability to search the literature for a
replication.

