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Stop misleading the public, check your rawdata first

Posted by dwilmot on 25 Jun 2021 at 16:12 GMT

Your reseach conculude that the virus appears to have spread to North America with an estimated first case being in the United States on January 16, 2020 (95% CI January 3, 2020), making the United States the fifth country.
However acorrding to the actual blood sample test in US, https://academic.oup.com/...
The covid anti body is already showing in the confirmed-reactive sera included 39 of 1912 (2.0%) donations collected between 13 and 16 December 2019 from residents of California (23/1912) and Oregon or Washington (16/1912).
Anti-body won't show in blood normally two weeks after infection. This implied that the first case in the West coast US should be well before end of Nov 2019. You need to check your data input. As we all know, in science research, garbage in, garbage out.

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RE: Stop misleading the public, check your rawdata first

David_Roberts replied to dwilmot on 26 Jun 2021 at 21:38 GMT

Thank you for your comment. As you will note the paper was submitted in September 2020, before the paper you cite was published, therefore at the time we conduct the analysis, which was based on the most accurate data at a global scale (203 countries and territories) that was available in May 2020. As we mentioned we were interested in dating the first cases that gave rise to be main body of country outbreaks rather than sporadic or non-sustained clusters. However I can not comment on the paper you cite as I am a conservation scientist that was a co-author on the paper that developed the OLE method we used; Jeremy Rossman a co-author in this paper however is an epidemiologist. All the best, Dave

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