A theory about online candle reviews and COVID cases was put under the microscope, and has taken on new relevance amid concern at the lack of official data heading into another winter.
Beauchamp's initial tweets on the findings in December 2021 went viral as well, and he scrambled to add more data to find a definitive answer.
"That is either due to lack of measurement of COVID, or worse measurements of COVID, or maybe something else changing. I presume the reviews themselves weren't changing very much," Beauchamp said. As for Beauchamp, he maintains a healthy level of skepticism for the study, even with all of his controls.These days, the quality of COVID tracking has become a cause for concern for Beauchamp and other experts working with public health data, especially as"The traditional data sources are getting worse. The CDC is sort of cutting back on its measurements. Everybody's measuring themselves less frequently.
"If we look back to the beginning of the epidemic, every case that we were documenting mattered a lot. And we were trying to figure out what to do with that data," Karan said. He said observing trends in reported cases was the clearest method, as long as there was no recent shift in the amount of testing available.