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This preprint is getting a lot of likes and retweets. But a correlation of .994 when one of the variables is an integer in the range (0,29) seems... optimistic. /1 https://twitter.com/BrennanSpiegel/status/1265119535901732865">https://twitter.com/BrennanSp...
The data don& #39;t seem to be readily available, so I digitised them by eye from Figure 2A. This will certainly be imperfect, but it& #39;s quite easy to calibrate the red [virus] dots, since the grey [admissions] dots must be integers. /2
![The data don& #39;t seem to be readily available, so I digitised them by eye from Figure 2A. This will certainly be imperfect, but it& #39;s quite easy to calibrate the red [virus] dots, since the grey [admissions] dots must be integers. /2](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EY-jTDHXsAEpxGu.jpg "The data don& #39;t seem to be readily available, so I digitised them by eye from Figure 2A. This will certainly be imperfect, but it& #39;s quite easy to calibrate the red [virus] dots, since the grey [admissions] dots must be integers. /2")
(There is apparently software to do this, but I don& #39;t know if that can handle the values of interest being on two Y-axes.) /3
I don& #39;t do Git, but I can make the CSV file available if anyone wants it. Otherwise the numbers are all in the image on the previous tweet, and you don& #39;t even need the dates. /4
Then I calculated the Pearson correlation between virus concentration and admissions 0, 1, 2, etc days later. /5
Here are the results. Not quite 0.994. And the largest correlation is on the day after the samples were taken (whereas the preprint says the best results were found after 3 days). /6
There is also the issue that the successive readings from day to day are probably not independent, but I& #39;ll leave that to people who understand the consequences of that better than me. /7
However, my provisional conclusion is that we probably shouldn& #39;t go round trying to predict hospital admissions from sewage sludge just yet. /8 /end
Tagging in authors @SaadOmer3 @jordan_peccia @NathanGrubaugh @WeinbergerDan, tweeter @BrennanSpiegel, and stats people who commented @stephensenn @RichardTol
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