A Critical Assessment of Some Recent Work on COVID-19

05/20/2020

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by   Jörg Stoye, et al.

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I tentatively re-analyze data from two well-publicized studies on COVID-19, namely the Charité "viral load in children" and the Bonn "seroprevalence in Heinsberg/Gangelt" study, from information available in the preprints. The studies have the following in common: - They received worldwide attention and arguably had policy impact. - The thrusts of their findings align with the respective lead authors' (different) public stances on appropriate response to COVID-19. - Tentatively, my reading of the Gangelt study neutralizes its thrust, and my reading of the Charité study reverses it. The exercise may aid in placing these studies in the literature. With all caveats that apply to n=2 quickfire analyses based off preprints, one also wonders whether it illustrates inadvertent effects of "researcher degrees of freedom."