Re:An Update on Dianna's Health (Physics Girl) [video]
by somenameforme on Friday March 10, 2023 @01:05AM
(#35090965)
I don't think what you're suggesting is especially good science. A study of hundreds of thousands with something that another study shows an incidence rate of 0.15% of is far more than enough to detect a signal. And so what really matters is methodology and limitations.
The CDC mentions a substantial number of limitations in their methodology. One very big one is that they did not consider underlying conditions. In the limited data that they provided [1] you'll notice black individuals and those on medicare are both substantially overrepresented in the myocarditis group. Neither of those factors cause myocarditis, but both are correlated strongly with obesity - which does. And black individuals, especially early on in the pandemic, were substantially overrepresented in infection rates. In other words a sample of the population that is disproportionately obese, which can cause myocarditis, were also disproportionately diagnosed with COVID.
And those sort of biases, among many others, were not considered. Notably all unconsidered biases share the common characteristic of likely inflating the estimated COVID:myocarditis relationship. By contrast in the Israeli study these factors (and many more) were carefully controlled for, alongside a consideration of how their results may differ, and why, relative to other major studies.
The CDC mentions a substantial number of limitations in their methodology. One very big one is that they did not consider underlying conditions. In the limited data that they provided [1] you'll notice black individuals and those on medicare are both substantially overrepresented in the myocarditis group. Neither of those factors cause myocarditis, but both are correlated strongly with obesity - which does. And black individuals, especially early on in the pandemic, were substantially overrepresented in infection rates. In other words a sample of the population that is disproportionately obese, which can cause myocarditis, were also disproportionately diagnosed with COVID.
And those sort of biases, among many others, were not considered. Notably all unconsidered biases share the common characteristic of likely inflating the estimated COVID:myocarditis relationship. By contrast in the Israeli study these factors (and many more) were carefully controlled for, alongside a consideration of how their results may differ, and why, relative to other major studies.
[1] - https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/109261