Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Jan 28, 2021)
Date Submitted: Aug 16, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Questions to the Article of the Infection Rate of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China: a Combined Analysis of Population Samples
ABSTRACT
The recent article published on July 22 in 2020 remains several questionable issues that are required to clarifications further, particularly for readers who hope to replicate Figure 1 from the data in Table 1. Although I reproduced a similar forest plot based on the effect ratios and their 95% confidence intervals(Cis) similar to Figure 1 in that article, no detailed information about the source of standard error(SE) for each country was seen and addressed. Others like the positive 95% Cis reflecting the negative Z values in the forest plot and the Q statistics used for examining the heterogeneity test are requied to interpretations and classifications. Most importantly, authors did not explain how to estimate the number of infected people in Wuhan, China, to be 143,000 ,significantly higher than the number of confirmed cases(=75,815 in Wuhan, China) that is required to provide the equations or methodologies in an article.
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