> Half of the people I know are working from home and stocked up on 1-2 months of food at the outset of this.

Seriously? Your personal network is evidence the this study is useless because of sampling bias?

Everyone I know voted for Hilary Clinton and yet here we are.

> People who are shopping in stores are absolutely a very biased sample.

People who have jobs that allow them to work from home are a very biased sample. How many grocery stockers are there in NYC compared to let’s say, software developers? I suspect you haven’t a clue, since by your own admission you don’t know a single person who needs to leave their home to work. So maybe your mental model if who makes up the population is skewed.

> People who have jobs that allow them to work from home are a very biased sample.

Yes, exactly. ...just like the study's data that excludes them.

That's my point.

Sure, I agree with you, excluding them is biased as well. A more appropriate phrase to be used to describe "people who have jobs that allow them to work from home" is "a small minority".

And let's be real, biasing your sample by not including a small minority doesn't affect the outcome of a study nearly as much as doing the opposite and sampling mostly from that small minority. Does it make the results less accurate? Yes. Does it make the results nearly as inaccurate as it would be if they excluded most of people but that minority? Not at all.

> Half of the people I know are working from home and stocked up on 1-2 months of food at the outset of this.

This surprises me if for no other reason than it takes a lot of space to store 1-2 months of food. Might be true, but is certainly different than what is going on in suburban Connecticut based on my social network.

Thanks for your observations. If, however, behavior in NYC is more or less the same as elsewhere, then what might account for the difference in the results between store-customer sampling in the city and elsewhere? The results may well be biased from sampling shoppers, but if the bias is assumed to be from shopping behavior, and that behavior is essentially the same everywhere, why does it not wash out?

One explanation might be that it got an earlier start in NYC, but both the hospitalizations and fatalities seem to have started showing up on about the same dates in the city and the surrounding suburbs.

There seems to be a significant ethnic variation, but ethnicity is such a correlate to other issues that it is not likely to be informative on its own.

Just out of curiosity, what studies are you asking the OP to compare?

Your sample of NYC residents is very likely non-representative...or biased

I’m a resident of SF downtown and previously DC and Boston. Everyone I know has stopped leaving their apartments/condos except for fresh air and are trying not to go to any stores. When possible are having food delivered. My friends in NYC have all left except for one who has a large apartment and no family without taking a flight.

I think people see these studies of places they visited once and determine that those areas are way more dense and that they have seen the news and that all those deaths are due to tons of people having it.

That is just not true. The studies are biased and likely this will go on for a long-time. We know this is way more deadly than the flu. That is obvious when you look at simple examples like the princess cruise in Japan. How often do 7+ people die on a cruise ship on a single voyage?

Please stop using “everyone I know” as a data point, especially when criticizing someone else’s sampling bias.

I am suffocating under the irony.

My point is that another set of pop exists that is not possible to test using the grocery store method.