Abstract
In a recent prominent study, Worobey et al. (2022. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Science, 377(6609), 951–959) purported to demonstrate statistically that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the epicentre of the early COVID-19 epidemic. We show that this statistical conclusion is invalid on two grounds: (a) The assumption that a centroid of early case locations or another simply constructed point is the origin of an epidemic is unproved. (b) A Monte Carlo test used to conclude that no other location than the seafood market can be the origin is flawed. Hence, the question of the origin of the pandemic has not been answered by their statistical analysis.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 710-719 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society |
| Volume | 187 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 16 Jan 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Aug 2024 |
Scopus Subject Areas
- Economics and Econometrics
- Statistics and Probability
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
- Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
User-Defined Keywords
- COVID-19
- Monte Carlo test
- Statistics did not prove that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the early epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic
- critique of statistical methods
- centre of point cloud