Re:Renewed questions about the virus, and hard-to-face answers
by raphlinus on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:19PM
(#27670048)
There's a whole story about this.
The figure I most often cite is 0.68% from the study by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Lea Merone[1]. That paper is skeptical of serosurveys that show high incidence (see the discussion of reference 61, which is by Ioannidis).
Ioannidis responded with the paper you cited, the preprint of which contained a personal and unprofessional attack against Meyerowitz-Katz, removed from the published version, though a scientific critique remains. Meyerowitz-Katz responded on Twitter[2], mostly to the substantive critiques. There's more drama around this, with a number of prominent virologists taking M-K's side (see the Twitter threads).
Also see the PubPeer reviews for this paper[3], which contain more serious criticism of Ioannidis.
I go into detail here to make a few points. The main one is that, especially when there's legitimate scientific controversy, citing a single paper can really fail to give the whole picture. Another is that "the science" isn't one simple monolithic set of beliefs, even on such a seemingly basic statistical question, but is actually more of a conversation.
The figure I most often cite is 0.68% from the study by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Lea Merone[1]. That paper is skeptical of serosurveys that show high incidence (see the discussion of reference 61, which is by Ioannidis).
Ioannidis responded with the paper you cited, the preprint of which contained a personal and unprofessional attack against Meyerowitz-Katz, removed from the published version, though a scientific critique remains. Meyerowitz-Katz responded on Twitter[2], mostly to the substantive critiques. There's more drama around this, with a number of prominent virologists taking M-K's side (see the Twitter threads).
Also see the PubPeer reviews for this paper[3], which contain more serious criticism of Ioannidis.
I go into detail here to make a few points. The main one is that, especially when there's legitimate scientific controversy, citing a single paper can really fail to give the whole picture. Another is that "the science" isn't one simple monolithic set of beliefs, even on such a seemingly basic statistical question, but is actually more of a conversation.
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v...
[2]: https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1376304539897237508
[3]: https://pubpeer.com/publications/9FE142DA15F748FA283605C7201...