Covid Research Waste - Bin 3

How about spending some of the gazillions on harmonised studies, which can give us answers or narrow uncertainty on viral transmission?

When we updated our review of the evidence of pre and asymptomatic transmission of SARS CoV-2, our first search was carried out on 31 March 2021. This identified 145 possible studies for inclusion. Using our framework as a measure of the study design's reliability, we could discard all but 18, or 12.5% of the total. A year later, we updated the search, showing the ratio was 5 to 1.

In the context of research waste, these findings alone pose several problems.

First, they suggest that as the spotlight moves away, so does researcher’s interest: a shallow, fallow indictment of the seriousness and probity of some of our colleagues.

Second, as we have pointed out countless times, the quality of research was abysmal, as evidenced by our attrition rate to find studies that could answer the question.

The evidence from systematic reviews reported that Mass Testing With Contact Tracing was low-quality. The Low-quality evidence mainly consisted of models relying on assumptions, not what happens on th…