Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): Epidemiology,

Postings can affect WoodCentral

kneale brownson

Too many postings on this topic can result in the website becoming a pandemic "target website" on search engines, which are becoming super sensitive to the use of the words, virus and pandemic in posting titles.

Is one too many cause I don't see any others!

Thanks for this and...

Howard Pollack

This looks like it will be useful, thank you. Here is another useful site: statnews.com -it's a site that tracks biotech news. Does a much better job than the usual news outlets. -Howard

Worrying over nothing...

John in NM

Even the most active conversations here are tiny compared to many general topic forums (Quora, citydata, reddit). I'd put money on a bet that this won't be a problem at WC.

Re: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): Epidemiol

Chuck Kettler

Good source. Thanks Bill

Pre-publishing

Don Stephan

A reporter's story on the radio this week addressed the issue of pre-publishing. The tremendous value of peer reviewed articles is just that - before publishing they were reviewed by the author's peers to verify content and accuracy. The radio story said that pre-published stories have not yet been peer reviewed and should be read accordingly. Unfortunately, like Youtube videos there are articles occasionally appearing that are found to be misleading or worse after peer review. No reason not to read articless, just check to see if peer reviewed.

Re: Worrying over nothing...

jessecloud

It can happen. Our little neighborhood forum (about 300 users) has been taken over by trolls disputing the science and demanding their "rights" to do whatever whenever wherever.

Thanks Bill.

drifting off topic....

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

"A reporter's story on the radio this week " Odds are this reporter has never published a scientific paper, nor peer reviewed one, and hence is unqualified to write on the topic. Unlike the YouTube analogy these pre-print publications are not for entertainment or to teach novices. The people writing them are not getting paid through advertising.

A more accurate way to consider preprints in this "all hands on deck" environment is to regard them as conversations among experts in the field about recent discoveries and observations. Tempering any inclination to claim "first" in a discovery is the important concern for preservation of reputation among peers. Trouble begins when reporters unqualified to judge the science troll these preprints for attention grabbing headlines. The value of the link I provided is these preprints and papers are being summarized and interpreted by experts, not reporters.

In the hard sciences like chemistry, it is rare to reject a paper because the science is faulty. Way more common is to reject a paper because the content is not suitable for the journal where it is submitted.

That said, in this rapidly developing environment initial conclusions from limited data at hand may change with more data. For example- pre-symptom people can be infectious. Turned out to be true and what makes this virus easily spread. People perhaps can be reinfected. Not proven but the hypothesis has resulted in additional work.

A good source....at least...

David Weaver

..as an alternative to the next scary story that shows up in the news each day.

Why?

Because the page has a lot more speech in the writing that sounds like something we'd say - as in, when something isn't settled, that site is good about saying that it's not.

When the news comes on and shows a diagram of a runner with a stream of what looks like plutonium coming out of them infecting 750 people running behind them, the site above clarifies the difference between finding virus and proving that it would be viable by culturing it or getting an idea on what the viral load might be.

My wife (who is in health care, but not a physician) has been a bit overly harsh after hearing news stories from her friends (some of them are physicians casually passing information around - which is odd to me) about people sitting in front of an air conditioner in italy, etc. Caveat that I haven't seen these stories because I'm not choosing to listen to any of them, rather read sites like the one you've presented....

... at any rate, someone along the line (hopefully not the original story) implied that the ventilation systems are spewing out virus and infecting everyone near. I poo-pooed that and asked if anyone had documented whether someone sitting in front of the A/C sneezed.

"they found viruses in the air conditioner!!"

(OK, I'd imagine that they could probably find them everywhere now - is it more likely that someone sneezed sitting in front of it, and is that less scary than the idea of an inanimate object spewing toxins - like a 60s B movie robot?)