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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why there wasn't a control - placebo effect would matter here and 1/80 dead could just simply be an effect of these patients being more closely monitored in the study, it doesn't sound too far off from the 1.2% death rate you see cited in some publications. This just isn't a confidence inducing paper.

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It's important to note the 1.2% case fatality rate includes all patients, including the 80% or so who do not require hospitalization.

This study was performed on a group requiring hospitalization, so a 1.2% mortality rate would appear extremely promising in that context.

Where in the study does it say that those with a low NEWS score were omitted? The only selection criterion I saw is pcr-positive for sars cov 2.

"Patients with PCR-documented SARS-CoV-2 RNA from a nasopharyngeal sample were admitted to our infectious diseases (ID) ward."

Doesn't list any other criteria. This is a small part of why control groups are so important.

It's also a really well written paper. Isn't it impressive how people just read into it and assume that there must be all these criteria that make the data better without them being detailed or a control group? Not many academic papers can communicate things (of differing levels of veracity) that they want to communicate but can't say explicitly so well.

There seem to be a huge number of people reading about this topic online who just want to be comforted and are willing to throw all critical thinking out the window to that end. That's the only way I can figure why all these optimistic but poorly designed papers are being cheered on places like HN and /r/covid19, not to mention the news.

Theres a reason even the language of scams - snake oil - has an origin in health panacea. Health and money have ways of getting people to believe things that they should be quite a bit more sceptical of.

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