110
votes
Accepted
Did the Black Lives Matter protests fail to cause a spike in coronavirus cases?
Not peer reviewed
The researchers from the University of Denver currently have their paper titled Black lives matter protests, social distancing and COVID-19 posted online as an NBER Working Paper. ...
- 1,827
48
votes
Has the flu already killed 20,000 Americans during 2019-20 flu season?
Fox News links to the CDC source which says:
CDC estimates that so far this season there have been at least 34 million flu illnesses, 350,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths from flu.
By "...
tim♦
- 51.9k
37
votes
Accepted
Is COVID-19 more dangerous than typical annual coronavirus variants?
I'd like to tackle a few sets of claims/arguments Wodarg makes in the two videos:
(Unknown) baseline prevalence of corona virus infections.
Excess mortality / "we wouldn't see anything special"
...
36
votes
Is the placebo effect getting stronger?
A recent study has suggested that effectiveness of placebo treatments increased over the years in the US, in patients suffering from neuropathic pain.
Increasing placebo responses over time in U.S. ...
- 526
32
votes
Accepted
Are electronic cigarettes a healthier alternative to regular cigarettes?
Electronic cigarettes may not be harmless but they are clearly much less harmful than cigarettes
Public Health England (PHE) produced a review of e-cigs in the middle of 2015 which came to this ...
- 56.2k
26
votes
Is COVID-19 more dangerous than typical annual coronavirus variants?
We can be extremely confident that a novel virus is spreading and being correctly detected by our tests
I'm only going to address claim 2, because the other claims are likely correct but essentially ...
- 2,533
18
votes
Did the Black Lives Matter protests fail to cause a spike in coronavirus cases?
At this point there isn't much we can say about this but to point to the study itself. I'm a non-expert and I haven't read the entire study, but it seems to me that the researchers are careful to ...
- 7,350
17
votes
Do surgical masks help prevent the spread of COVID-19 from infected members of the public?
We finally have a study that examines surgical masks and their effectiveness under different viral-load situations and compares their effectiveness to other types of masks. The research provides the ...
16
votes
Has the flu already killed 20,000 Americans during 2019-20 flu season?
The number of confirmed deaths due to influenza has been much less than 20,000 for the 2019-2020 flu season through March 5th 2020.
According the the US National Center for Health Statistics, the ...
- 106k
14
votes
Are the Apollo astronauts experiencing heart disease at a higher than average rate?
The basic answer is: we don't know. If you look at the original paper, you will find table 2, which shows that the number of people in the Apollo Lunar Astronauts group was 7 (n=7). Of those, 43% (...
- 1,171
13
votes
Does Texas have the worst maternal mortality in the developed world?
Here are the raw numbers claimed in the article:
From 2000 to the end of 2010, Texas’s estimated maternal mortality rate hovered between 17.7 and 18.6 per 100,000 births. But after 2010, that rate ...
tim♦
- 51.9k
13
votes
Is Lyme disease a global pandemic?
TL;DR summary:
There are indeed varying definitions of a pandemic; some emphasize (or even require) human-to-human transmission and some don't.
It's difficult to apply a definition that emphasizes ...
- 59.8k
12
votes
Is COVID-19 more dangerous than typical annual coronavirus variants?
With the benefit of hindsight (i.e. more data), EuroMOMO now (April 7) shows excess scores for several more countries:
The fact that Italy and Spain are in "the top" z-scores should be self-...
- 59.8k
12
votes
Are two thirds of cancer mutations random and unavoidable?
The actual research paper Stem cell divisions, somatic mutations, cancer etiology, and cancer prevention Science 24 Mar 2017:
Vol. 355, Issue 6331, pp. 1330-1334 says:
It is now widely accepted that ...
- 106k
12
votes
Did the Black Lives Matter protests fail to cause a spike in coronavirus cases?
The conclusion of the study is that protests have led to increased social distancing elsewhere which offsets the growth in cases induced by the protests themselves.
Firstly, this is akin to saying ...
- 253
11
votes
Is there a correlation between vaccination levels and new COVID-19 cases?
I think there are several sources of confusion here;
1.
Increases in COVID‐19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States
This statement is ...
- 1,058
10
votes
Are blue lights giving people cancer?
The thinking is that disrupted sleep results in lower melatonin production which through some unknown mechanism might make the body more vulnerable to the cancers.
This is classical clickbait. Even ...
- 201
9
votes
Does excess salt in food cause thousands of deaths per annum in the UK?
The meta-analysis and the Guardian article are not talking about the same thing.
The specific Guardian claim is [my emphasis]:
thousands of unnecessary strokes and heart attacks have occurred ... ...
- 1,309
8
votes
Accepted
Are child thyroid cancer rates around Fukushima 20—50x higher?
When one reviews the comments of the Director General report of IAEA in Aug 2015 to the Tsuda et.al's study, there are valid issues noted which will need to be addressed in the future by Tsuda et.al ...
- 22.7k
8
votes
Do societies that are less abstemious have more sensible drinking patterns?
In short: No. But it is a bit more complicated than that.
It is probably a bad way to phrase it like "The more alcohol a society consumes, the fewer alcohol-related problems and alcohol-related ...
- 44.1k
7
votes
Have few, if any, studies on the health effects of particulate air pollution measured the actual exposure to particulates?
If anything, some studies suggest that the present measurement methods underestimate the effects:
A reanalysis of the data by Willis et al, restricted to people who live closer to the monitor, ...
- 59.8k
6
votes
Does more than one unit of alcohol a day damage your long term brain function and increase the risk of dementia?
The newspaper headlines exaggerate the paper's conclusions, but they, in turn, are not justified by the data shown
The paper itself does not make any attempt to measure the occurrence of specific ...
- 56.2k
6
votes
Did the Black Lives Matter protests fail to cause a spike in coronavirus cases?
Covid rates have gone up in the USA, not down.
The number of cases/day in the USA has grown tremendously in June 2020, after undergoing a somewhat flat or slightly downward trend in April and May.
...
- 559
6
votes
Did the Black Lives Matter protests fail to cause a spike in coronavirus cases?
While numerous mainstream media outlets claimed that the BLM protests did not increase COVID-19 infection rates based primarily on an NBER working paper (which had not been peer reviewed), subsequent ...
- 3,145
5
votes
Is COVID-19 more dangerous than typical annual coronavirus variants?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-01/coronavirus-italy-shows-we-may-be-underestimating-death-toll
Mortality in parts of Italy is 5x normal. While most of the cases aren't identified ...
- 1,121
5
votes
Are the Apollo astronauts experiencing heart disease at a higher than average rate?
If the question is:
Are the Apollo astronauts experiencing heart disease at a higher than average rate?
The answer is possibly, but the data is not rock-solid.
Otherwise, if you ask if the ...
- 1,810
5
votes
Accepted
Were millions of people infected by SARS?
No.
The premise behind the article seems to be that SARS was widely prevalent (in some areas), >10% of people were infected, without severe symptoms, and developed antibodies that can now be tested ...
- 141k
5
votes
Do surgical masks help prevent the spread of COVID-19 from infected members of the public?
First, surgical masks (especially doubled up) work fine for keeping you safe from aerosols. Cloth masks also work to some extent, but not quite as much. This has been shown in a number of studies, but ...
- 5,487
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible