[Fomite]

Please don't follow Eric Ding. He's not particularly qualified, and his statements to date have betrayed that he's not actually all that good at infectious disease epidemiology.

I'd suggest, in place, Maia Majumder (@maiamajumder) and Tara Smith (@aetiology).

[jdhendrickson]

Could you please flesh out your comment on Ding's skill in regard to infectious disease epidemiology ? I don't doubt you, I just like to know why people say things.

[Fomite]

Sure thing.

First, note that Eric Feigl-Ding is a nutritional epidemiologist, not an infectious disease epidemiologist. Infectious diseases are weird for a lot of reasons, and require something of a different skillset.

For example, in a Tweet of his he has now deleted: "never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career." about the estimate for R0 for this novel coronavirus.

Similar R0 estimates existed for SARS, and MERS. Measles, Rubella and a number of other diseases have vastly higher R0s.

He also messed up some things like conflating R0 with secondary attack rates, and was generally very sensationalistic. Basically, the things that boosted him to prominence in this epidemic built on fairly sloppy reasoning from someone outside the field.

He's calmed down now, but one might as well go to sources for people who are both good at science communication and actual outbreak scientists.

[ixtli]

Thank you for making the effort required to put all this together.

[Fomite]

My pleasure.

[ortusdux]

Any sources that you do recommend?

[RandomBacon]

Maybe the person you asked edited their comment after you asked, but he/she listed their recommendations here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304794

[richajak]

Thanks for the info, I have just followed all those twitter accounts. Should we be objective about the facts presented? Do not shoot the messenger. We may be doing injustice to him if we dismiss every thing that he said. I do not know him but it seems that he may a bit over "enthuastic" in this topic. However, it is not good idea to belittle someone.

For those not aware of the drama, he suggested that the virus was mixed with HIV and invented by ... ;-) He removed the tweets after that. We all know it' a touchy topic.

[illinformed]

I wouldnt put infectious disease epidemiologists on a pedestal either, whilst they can use plain old Police-like detection methods to identify so called Super Spreaders, the egit's can not identify what makes someone a Super Spreader. Considering the medical profession are so limited in their ability to measure the content of every cell and condition of every cell, cell sensing, signalling, enzymatic activity and radical activity in-vivo, eg localised hydroxyl radical activity in the presence of pathogens, infectious disease epidemiologists are no better than social commentators if society is considered an organism, or economists who swear to an economic school of thought on a par with a religion of your choice.

All experts have a common trait, they espouse their virtues when they are right and slink into the shadows when they are wrong, sometimes, if they have the audacity they wait for the next opportunity before popping up like a jack in a box.

[reustle]

Replying with clickable links for each of these twitter accounts:

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing

https://twitter.com/MackayIM

https://twitter.com/trvrb

-

https://twitter.com/maiamajumder

https://twitter.com/aetiology

[foldingmoney]

Also https://twitter.com/HelenBranswell