Despite this story going massively viral (because it is about penises) I reckon it's worth pointing out that the evidence or this statement seems to be mostly theoretical
The only scientific paper referenced that I can find anywhere is this piece from July that basically says that there are plausible pathways for COVID-19 to cause ED so we should watch out for it
I mean, sure, the pathways seem plausible, but imo the time to be really worried about something is when we've got evidence that it is a problem
Anyway, I suspect that the fact that there isn't even a case series on ED post COVID-19 when there are papers on literally everything else suggests that while this may be a concern it is probably not quite as scary as the headline suggests
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Lockdowns have mostly not been associated with a large increase in suicide rates: a thread of evidence (CW: suicide, mental health) 🧵
Since this has been a major talking point throughout the pandemic, I thought I'd collate the now quite large evidence-base showing that suicide rates have mostly remained steady during lockdowns/COVID times
1. Queensland, Australia
Slight decrease in suicide rates after emergency announced, no statistical change over lockdown vs previous years thelancet.com/journals/lanps…
Big news! Our systematic review and meta-analysis of the age stratified IFR of COVID-19 with @BillHanage, Andy Levin, and others has now been published in the European Journal of Epidemiology
For those who are interested, the largest clinical trial to date has thus far not shown a benefit for vitamin D supplementation to treat severe COVID-19
Ugh both the headline and the study it's based on are...pretty dubious
Let's look at some science on twitter 1/n
2/n Paper is here, it's really your bog-standard epidemiological study. The authors took a large database of people who had tested positive to COVID-19 and compared them to people who hadn't in Israel sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
3/n The two groups were different in loads of ways. However, after putting all the variables into a statistical model, they found that asthma appeared to still be significantly connected to risk of COVID-19!
Worth clarifying here that what I mean is that there will undoubtedly be many reports of problems that people have following vaccination - this is NORMAL
It's just the law of large numbers at work. If enough people are given a vaccine, sooner or later one of them will be, say, hit by a car shortly after
The question is whether this is related to the vaccine or not!
2/n Paper is here. Basically, the authors took total COVID-19 mortality in a range of countries by August 31st and correlated them with country-level metrics such as average BMI frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
3/n The authors found that country-level metrics compiled by the University of Oxford on the stringency of lockdowns did not correlate well with the number of deaths that a country experienced from COVID-19, but other things like BMI and latitude did