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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

> Produce and spread good information instead.

Also: identify bad information and seek to stop it from spreading! That’s what this article is all about.

January. February. March. April. It's been almost 4 months since we know about Covid-19. From the rock I'm living under, it appears that the scientific community at large has produced remarkably little reliable data. Where are the epidemiological studies?

Producing reliable data is the highest priority.

Epidemiological studies are known as “models”. Those are being produced at a rapid clip, and are being updated daily as we get more data. As with most models, they start out with huge error bars and get better over time.

Every epi would LOVE to have widespread test data, but we don’t. Oh well.

These antibody tests only became feasible in the past two weeks, when the tests were actually developed and validated, and then this test was run.

There’s a ton of science being done, if you stop and listen to what is being published.

Conducting experiments is expensive in both money and effort. Let's all sit in our comfy chairs and build fancier models with garbage data instead. If we could divine just the right formula, it will magically paper over the holes in the data. Sounds like every other scientific area I'm aware of. For whatever reason, the experimentalist is a dying breed.

Edit: Do you happen to have a link to a good aggregator for listening to "what's being published"?

You do know that epidemiologists are statisticians, right? They, um, don’t do experiments and never have and never will. They crunch numbers and fit them to models. Which is what they are doing.

If you want to see more data, well yes, so does everyone. What magic tool would you like people to use to get that data? As I explained above, we seem to have a shortage of swab tests to determine infection, and antibody tests only became available about a week ago, at which point people started to use them.

Not quite sure what more you are asking to be done here?

That attitude reminds me of certain type of software engineers: We are engineers, our time is too valuable to write tests, hire someone else to do so. When I hear that, I run away. Fast. The world needs results, and there are little. How about we stop the excuses and roll our sleeves instead?

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