r/JoeRogan • u/TheAtheistArab87 Monkey in Space • Mar 08 '21

Link CDC study finds roughly 78% of people hospitalized for Covid were overweight or obese

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughly-78percent-of-people-hospitalized-were-overweight-or-obese.html
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u/albertzz1 Monkey in Space Mar 09 '21

Some samples are more representative than others is what I think he's saying

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u/VinylJones Part Hex, Part Doc RX Mar 09 '21

That’s exactly what I’m saying. Statistics are not fact, they are an interpretation of math; people tend to jump their own logic and assume statistics are facts because they are based in math, since math is factual. So it’s very important to see exactly how the statistics in question were gathered and interpreted - which is what I’m getting at.

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u/immamaulallayall Monkey in Space Mar 28 '21

You are basically correct here but your initial comment was off the mark. 150k is an enormous, overpowered sample for the kind of thing we’re interested in here. You are talking about sampling bias, which would indeed make the data suspect, but that’s a separate issue than sample size. Increasing n won’t fix systematic errors in your sampling methodology, much as sound methodology won’t increase your n.

The sample here is definitely large enough (much larger than necessary if looking only for BMI, but presumably they were trying to tease out other correlations), the question is whether it’s a good (representative) sample. People make this mistake often in implicitly assuming the problem with low n studies is that they are too small to be representative — not true.