I have no doubt that there is a correlation and I did read the Bayesian Vector Autoregression paper. However, I think it's a bit misleading for a doctor to take to social media with some
very casual observations of Amazon reviews and make confident claims that covid is about to "surge" so therefore we should all return to masking. I need a lot more than just his screenshots of the reviews. I need to see the cases actually surging. They aren't in most of the world. One of his "no scent" reviews was actually just a subjective review that the scent isn't strong enough. The others were from a week ago. His linked article claims "COVID-19 cases predicted more “no smell” reviews. For every 100,000 new COVID-19 cases per week, he found, “no smell” reviews increased by a quarter of a percentage point in the next week." So shouldn't we have seen this surge already?
This just feels sloppy to me.