Keep Puffing Boys, Keep Puffing

[Richmond B. Funkenhouser]

Could be that people aren't allowed to smoke in nursing homes and those people in nursing homes make up the majority of corona statistics... solved.

 

[mithridate]

I guess I'll smoke a bit more in coming months due to this article. Not because I'd think it protects me from getting Korona, but just because it happens to be an excellent excuse.

 

[KafkaStoleMyBike]

This is a fun exercise in spurious correlations, as famously demonstrated by the likes of Tyler Vigen and other big-data statisticians*. There are far too many confounding variables to make any assumptions about SARS-CoV-2 at this point, but this was a fun read nonetheless.

*the age of Miss America winners and deaths in the US by steam and vapor instruments exhibits a beautiful correlation, amongst countless others.

 

[Casual]

It says the retraction is simply due to undisclosed financial ties, and that there were no accusations that the study was itself invalid. And also that normally undisclosed financial ties are not enough to retract a paper but this particular paper has too much wrongthink.

In other words, we are no closer to actually understanding if there is an effect or not. The whole effort is poisoned on several sides by different interests, and I’m not sure that we will actually get an objective look at this stuff until the current players are long dead.

 

[Worknman]

I googled it and apparently only Camel smokers get the benefit