[stupac2]

I'm a bit too on beer right now to read an academic paper, but my issue was never with their sample size, just that finding a signal, any signal, that's multiple orders of magnitude lower than your baseline is always a very hard problem. Then you add the confounding factor of the massive behavioral changes being implemented now and I'm not sure it's possible at all.

Damn it. I just spit my wine onto my keyboard. . . .Thanks for the laugh!

Glad I could help!

---

Alternative explanation now that I think about it:

Enact a shelter-in-place order for a deadly pandemic and all of a sudden a lot of hypocondriacs (you know this because they bought a connected thermometer [ed: I bought one too, lol]) and a lot of hypocondriacs are stuck at home with nothing better to do than check their temperature again, driving down the proportion of abnormal temperatures out there.

BC

Amusingly this came up in a different venue where I posted this website, but these charts are just showing the total number of fevers, so this explanation doesn't make sense (since it's not per reading or per capita or anything else, although presumably it adjusts for the total number of thermometers). The only way this explanation would work is if you think that a bunch of people with low-grade fevers who otherwise wouldn't check it are suddenly checking, and that would drive it in the opposite direction (and, as you said, the people who buy fancy-ass thermometers are probably the kind to check out of caution every time they feel remotely wrong, so it doesn't even really make sense then).

[stupac2]

I'm a bit too on beer right now to read an academic paper, but my issue was never with their sample size, just that finding a signal, any signal, that's multiple orders of magnitude lower than your baseline is always a very hard problem. Then you add the confounding factor of the massive behavioral changes being implemented now and I'm not sure it's possible at all.

Damn it. I just spit my wine onto my keyboard. . . .Thanks for the laugh!

Glad I could help!

---

Alternative explanation now that I think about it:

Enact a shelter-in-place order for a deadly pandemic and all of a sudden a lot of hypocondriacs (you know this because they bought a connected thermometer [ed: I bought one too, lol]) and a lot of hypocondriacs are stuck at home with nothing better to do than check their temperature again, driving down the proportion of abnormal temperatures out there.

BC

Amusingly this came up in a different venue where I posted this website, but these charts are just showing the total number of fevers, so this explanation doesn't make sense (since it's not per reading or per capita or anything else, although presumably it adjusts for the total number of thermometers). The only way this explanation would work is if you think that a bunch of people with low-grade fevers who otherwise wouldn't check it are suddenly checking, and that would drive it in the opposite direction (and, as you said, the people who buy fancy-ass thermometers are probably the kind to check out of caution every time they feel remotely wrong, so it doesn't even really make sense then).