COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

Goatman Saint said

First article talks about the S and L strains. It says the more deadly strain has been replaced by the more communicable, yet less deadly strain in complete contradiction to people saying it’s gotten worse. However it is sprinkled heavily with may, possibly and appears as qualifiers in a non peer reviewed article. The second one talks about mutations, but then proceeds to state this. p = 4.8e-06,median 25, IR 21-28, versus median 19, IR 21-25) (Fig. S5) (Liu et al., 2020). There was, however, no significant correlation found between D614G status and hospitalization status; although the G614 mutation was slightly enriched among the ICU subjects, this was not statistically significant. So, once again, everyone knows it mutates, but nothing has been said it makes it any more infectious or deadly. This is also liberally sprinkled with mays, possibly, seems and mights.

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For the record, the use of [may, possibly, appears, suggests, etc..] is proper science writing, especially when writing about new or preliminary research. It implies that this is how they interpret things, and they are acknowledging that they might be wrong, or that there are confounds that they are unaware of. I have NO problem with that style of writing. At all.

As far as the non-peer reviewed aspect of it, the urgency of this situation requires getting data and possible [see what I did there?] interpretations published for other researchers to read and think about. Their names and thus their reputations are on the line when they publish, and if they publish nonsense or worse (fabricated bs), that will bite them in the butt when they apply for their next job, or write their next grant. Every scientist knows this, but some take it more seriously than others. They chose a non-peer reviewed route rather than wait for months for other scientists to perform the review.