Thread by @SarahDRasmussen

@apsmunro @interpolated I have no problem with the article itself. It’s with the summary written for it, which you amplified without explaining any corrective context, not even the fact that those positive results were from random sampling, whereas the ordinary assumption would be targeted testing.

@apsmunro @interpolated In the meantime, you cheer on 0-follower 21-tweet trolls who attack me when I try to have a nuanced discussion where I simply ask questions about the level of evidence we should demand before advocating for a certain policy—a question relevant to your own advocacy.

@apsmunro @interpolated But in case it’s more helpful if I explain what I mean when I speak of recent cherry picking of headlines, articles and/or evidence standards... 0/n

@apsmunro @interpolated You wrote 2 threads amplifying a BJM ADC article computing relative SAR for children to household contacts, which excluded contacts on grounds of being “assessed to have the same exposure as the paediatric COVID-19 index cases.” That’s great, but... 1/
adc.bmj.com/content/early/…

@apsmunro @interpolated It only excluded *positive* contacts on grounds of common exposure, not *negative* contacts.

It excluded 40 of 41 pos contacts, keeping only the contact of an index child flown in from the UK, but it didn’t exclude a single neg contact—likely an orders-of-magnitude effect. 2/

@apsmunro @interpolated You also, without stopping to check, amplified 2 false claims of the BJM ADC article—1st that they’d used precisely the same data as a large SK contact tracing study you’d dismissed, and 2nd that a third study had used the same SAR computation method, when it hadn’t at all. 3/

@apsmunro @interpolated In your thread on the huge Science Mag contact tracing study from India—the largest the world had, which took months of work by 1000s of contact tracers, you used this BJM ADC study to claim this India study “doesn’t get us closer” on the question of child infectiousness. 4/

@apsmunro @interpolated You furthermore dismissed this India study on the basis that

“Small and detailed beats big and dirty.”

Those exact words. 5/

https://twitter.com/apsmunro/status/1311616504518111232

@apsmunro @interpolated But a few days later, when several pointed out an exquisitely contact-traced single-setting 29-case cluster study in a low-infection area, where at least 5 of 8 infected infants transmitted to family members, you twice dismissed this “small and detailed” study as “anecdotal.” 6/

https://twitter.com/apsmunro/status/1315689006525558786

@apsmunro @interpolated Never mind the small-N studies you’d cited like the Irish one with 3 students who didn’t transmit before isolating with symptoms.

Also, in reply to comment on your *other* tweet dismissing the 29-cluster as “anecdote,” you tweeted the below word-of-mouth (anecdotal) claim. 7/

https://twitter.com/apsmunro/status/1315572183918350336

@apsmunro @interpolated Later, you retweeted the below infographic, which combines a false caption on the left with such miscontextualised comments on the right as to suggest an opposite interpretation to what the data actually say. 8/

@apsmunro @interpolated Here’s a thread detailing problems with the infographic. 9/

https://twitter.com/SarahDRasmussen/status/1317105671452721152

@apsmunro @interpolated And then when I complained today about a highly-misleading NYTimes staff-written summary for a (good) NYTimes article, you characterised this as my finding fault with the article itself.

The article’s great. My tweets mostly reported on what the article actually said. 10/

@apsmunro @interpolated I *still* maintain your heart’s in the right place.

Even if I find fault with some of what you post, I know you only do it because you feel strongly that lockdown and school closures are horrible for kids, and you want to protect kids from horribleness. I respect that. 11/

@apsmunro @interpolated I ask that you, in turn, respect that in the UK, there are medically vulnerable parents who face fines and prosecution for withdrawing their child temporarily from in-person school.

*My* vision of horribleness is a child ending up feeling responsible for a parent’s death. 12/

https://twitter.com/SarahDRasmussen/status/1314593804633231360

@apsmunro @interpolated It’s also true that for most European countries, I can predict (within +/-week) when school reopened just by looking at the case count timeline. It’s important we understand why.

Is it parents returning to outside-home work, school pickups, unis, crowded schools, what? 13/

@apsmunro @interpolated That’s why things like correct denominators and contextual data about crowding etc matters.

Because if we get these answers wrong, it will mean more lockdowns, more deaths, and more children suffering.

No one’s perfect, but that’s why policing science/scicom is important. 14/

@apsmunro @interpolated I’m writing this as a reply instead of as a free-standing thread, because I don’t want trolling you to be a major theme of my timeline.

I’m sorry if some of my posts have made you feel singled out. 15/

@apsmunro @interpolated If it makes you feel better, I’ve policed at least 5 other COVID scientists/sci-commers as well, and I have a small sideline policing wacky PubMed articles, like extra-dimensional telecommunicating DNA forming black holes in the centre of the earth. 16/
popularmechanics.com/science/enviro…

@apsmunro @interpolated As a mathematician, I feel it would be presumptuous of me to try to publish single-author original research in epidemiology.

But pointing out things like invalid denominators is well within the scope of my qualifications.

Like you, I’d like to contribute where I can. 17/17

@apsmunro @interpolated Wow, kind of disappointing that after taking the trouble to explain all that, and making a point of locating this in a very low-traffic comment thread, his unique take is to subtweet that

scientific review/correction = being mean to Munro

https://twitter.com/apsmunro/status/1318595266166095872