Comment by brb92 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brb92 | Hacker News Reader

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> For the reduced logistic regression model, the score was given by the following formula: S = 0.259503 × NumberSymptoms + 0.055457 × age − 0.633310 × sex − 3.20 (where sex is encoded as 1 − female/2 − male) Where ‘NumberSymptoms’ corresponds to the sum of different symptoms experienced over the first week among the list of 14 symptoms reported on daily logs. This score was then transformed to a probability using the formula: 1/(1 + exp(−score))

> App users were disproportionately female, and those over 70 years of age were underrepresented, which could increase or decrease our estimate of the prevalence and duration of long COVID.

So basically if the patient is a 30 y.o man with 7 symptoms has almost twice more chance of having long covid than a woman on the same conditions ? Hmmmmmmmmmmm

Not an epidemiologist so don't weigh my opinion too highly, but as a data analyst, my first impression of this "model" is overfitted nonsense.

I checked the paper to try and defend it, but I was unable to find a table with significance testing or standard errors for this regression - it is just stated without justification.

This seems an unusual style of reporting results, to me. (Happy to be corrected)

I don't see a table but Fig 3 presents 95% confidence intervals for the odds ratios in the logistic model.

Gender differences wouldn't be unheard of. Also, in that model, being male reduces your predicted probably of long COVID.

This model does seem kinda wacky though. Just throwing in 1 symptom, age of 30, and female gives a probability of 13% which seems high. I'll have to read the paper more carefully to figure out what exactly that probability is supposed to mean.

GP is saying that the model appears to directly contradict the abstract, which says females are more affected.

No. A woman, at any age and number of symptoms, has twice the risk of a man. Which was already well-known before.

I find that particularly interesting considering that men are more at risk of dying from Covid.

Maybe women have a somehow weaker immune response, making it harder to clear the infection, but lowering the risk of a deadly overreation.

I wonder if there is serious research about that.

Women have a stronger immune system, which tends to lead to better resilience against dying from infections, but also greater susceptibility to autoimmune disease. Which long covid might well be.

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