This new paper setting #medtwitter afire claims to show that children are the index cases 70% of the time in household covid transmission.

It assumes that if a kid gets a fever first and then an adult in the house 1 to 7 days later, then the kid got covid and passed it to the adult.

This is a bad way to infer the direction of transmission. It’s possible that parents had a fever, but didn’t bother to check themselves until after their kid developed a fever and they checked them.

The paper does not even test a single participant for covid, so the fever might not represent covid at all. Nor does it check for other contacts the adult or kid may have had outside the house

Additionally, the sample is self-selected: it consists of people who opt into a fever reporting app — not representative of the population as a whole.

This new paper setting #medtwitter afire claims to show that children are the index cases 70% of the time in household covid transmission.

It assumes that if a kid gets a fever first and then an adult in the house 1 to 7 days later, then the kid got covid and passed it to the…

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) June 3, 2023

[DS–Dr. Bhattacharya is one of the few American epidemiologists who got it right during COVID. A brilliant Stanford Medical School researcher, he was viciously attacked as a “fringe” epidemiologist by Fauci. I know who I trust.]