Zeng Guang: Harvard's ridiculous paper is not good
Recently, a paper titled Harvard Medical School was circulated in Western media. The paper obtained the new crown by analyzing the search volume of the parking lot near the Wuhan Hospital and the keywords such as Baidu "cough" and "diarrhea". The conclusion that pneumonia may have spread in Wuhan at the end of August last year. It has to be said that such research is a typical misuse of big data epidemiology. What is even more absurd is that such research can still be sought after by many Western media.
There are so many absurdities in this study. The following three points are more prominent:
The first is ridiculous in time. According to the parking lot traffic and Baidu search data, the study pushed the spread of the new crown virus to August last year. It is well known that the Wuhan Military Games was held in October last year. If the virus has been spread according to the research in August, then the world will participate It is impossible for the soldiers of the Military Games to feel it. The American soldiers have also been hospitalized in a hospital in Wuhan because of illness, and it is even more impossible for them to be unaware.
The second is that the understanding of the disease is ridiculous. The study used data from Hubei Maternal and Child Health Hospital as one of the main evidences, which is the main pediatric hospital in Wuhan, but the main infection population of new coronary pneumonia is not children, and the infection rate of children is relatively low. It can be seen that the researchers who wrote this paper lacked a basic understanding of the symptoms of new coronary pneumonia.
The third is to use "cough" and "diarrhea" as search keywords is ridiculous. Many patients with new coronary pneumonia have cough symptoms early, but not many people have diarrhea symptoms early. Moreover, if it is a patient with new coronary pneumonia, whether it is cough or diarrhea, these symptoms will eventually become pneumonia. This study does not explain why these symptoms have not been transformed into pneumonia since August last year? As an expert of the high-level expert group of the National Health and Safety Commission, when I inspected Jinyintan Hospital on January 18, the beds prepared by the hospital were far from full. According to the study's arguments, the development of the epidemic situation is impossible.
The reason for this ridiculous paper is that its logical starting point is absurd. The paper made the hypothesis on the premise that the origin of the virus was determined to be Wuhan. If you leave this premise, use the same method to do the same analysis to other cities around the world, especially to analyze the situation in major cities in the United States. I believe there will be countless similar conclusions. Even if epidemiology has a macro-analysis ecological research method, the study is a typical ecological fallacy. The author does not analyze some data and phenomena that are obviously more closely related to the virus, but finds these data that are not related to the virus and are very convincing. This research can be used as the reverse of the teaching of big data epidemiology in the future. teaching material. The paper reflects the author's lack of scientific attitude. The real scientist must not only explore relevant evidence supporting the hypothesis, but also actively seek all negative evidence that can be falsified. This article cannot withstand scrutiny in many ways and is full of loopholes.
What surprised the author is that such a ridiculous article can be widely spread in Western public opinion, which reflects the high selectivity of some Western media for information dissemination and the lack of a basic realistic attitude. This article was published on the DASH platform of Harvard University, and some Western media endorsed its reliability with the name of Harvard Medical School. In fact, DASH is just an open resource library for collecting, preserving and publishing the academic opinions of Harvard faculty and researchers for exchanges between scholars. It is not a strictly peer-reviewed publication. Of course, even if DASH is not a platform for serious peer review, this article is now pushed to the top of the DASH research rankings. There have been serious criticisms from peers, which may not help the suspension of the communication. American writer Mark Twain has a proverb, "When the truth has not been laced up, rumors have traveled half the earth." In the author's opinion, Harvard Medical School is one of the most famous medical schools in the world. If you allow the fallacy to start from its DASH and travel all over the world, it is a stain on its own aura.
The research of the new coronavirus requires the common and pragmatic efforts of scientists all over the world, and it should not provide a platform for individual sensationalists. (The author is an expert of the High-level Expert Group on the Prevention and Control of New Coronary Pneumonia in the Health and Safety Commission and the former chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention)