How to Know If This New COVID-19 Story Is Worth Cheering For
Maybe someday there will be a vaccine or a miracle cure for COVID-19. But if it does, it won’t be immediately obvious from the news that is broadcast on your TV or on your social network. Large and important studies are coming in all the time, and most of them turn out to be frustrating when you learn the whole story.
Here are some questions to ask if you think you are looking at something big:
What were the actual results?
The headline will make everything sound really dramatic, because headlines do that. But keep reading the article and ask the question: what did they actually find?
For example, one of the first headlines I saw on Twitter this morning was “Coronavirus Rescue Drug Discovered”. ( This is an article; the heading has since been changed.) This heading implies that there is one miracle cure, now we have found it, and deaths from coronavirus are a thing of the past. In fact, all this is not true.
Instead, the story explains that the drug reduced the mortality rate from 41% to 28% for ventilated patients and from 25% to 20% for patients who were not on ventilators but were sick enough to need oxygen.
The headline is accurate in the sense that it seems like lives have been saved, but this is not a complete cure, it doesn’t work for everyone, and it only shows these results in people who were already in severe illness. Is this what you thought when you first saw the headline?
What do other scientists think of this?
Science is evolving at a rapid pace these days, and not every study stands the test. It turns out that some of the COVID-19 studies have been sloppy or overstated, based on minimal results, or based on data that seems sketchy and cannot be verified .
We do not seek to be immediately aware of research problems. It usually takes at least a few days for scientists to discuss and study an article before the problem is discovered. (If you’ve heard of peer-review, that is, the process by which several scholars can review an article before it is published in an academic journal, that should give a head start in this discussion. But it is not a guarantee of quality.)
I have come to be wary of any new research or announcement. As a reader, you may be looking for one thing: Did the news article reporter interview the scientists who read the study but did not participate in the study themselves? If all the quotes in the news are from the people who did the research, be skeptical until you hear more.
Has the full study been published?
Anyone can call a reporter and say they’ve found great results. However, if there is science to back it up, they will be able to show everyone the full study. In the COVID-19 era, we have seen many results announced in a press release or at a press conference, but scientists have not published the full methods or baseline data.
From an ethical point of view, people conducting research have a responsibility to act quickly if they find that a treatment is particularly dangerous or especially vital. It is believed that early completion of a test or the issuance of important results can save lives and cannot be postponed.
But there is another side to this dilemma: What if the research is wrong or the results are incomplete? Remember, you want other scientists to be able to look at the study to determine if it is actually useful and what the limitations might be. Announcing a result without publishing data makes it nearly impossible for the rest of the scientific community to do their job.
Sometimes even non-medical research is announced without paper, such as the story that half of the Twitter accounts that talked about reopening were actually “bots.” The results were announced in a press release , and other researchers wondered how the “bot” was defined, and thus whether the study actually found what the researchers said it did.
What will happen next?
If we do find a real miracle cure for the coronavirus, it won’t be one-time news that will never be seen again. The results will be confirmed by additional trials, other scientists and doctors will comment on how it works, and this story will appear in the news again and again as this process continues.
Remember that there are dozens of drugs and vaccines in development , and it will be a long time before we know for sure if any of them will work. Most likely, we will receive several drugs, each of which will help at least a little more than one miracle cure. So don’t just look at one story; think about where this new news fits into what was already known. And wait and see what happens next.