Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Jamesbeam 2283 days ago
May I ask how is any of the data you collect of any use if there is zero verification that said data is from actual people with symptoms?

I was just able to enter a US Zip code and normal temperature 98.6 without any verification. The site doesn't even check for location. I was able to enter data for a "US citizen" from Europe. Then clear cookies and do it again.

Verification of data is a huge thing if you want to make any kind of decision based on that data.
1 comments
x0xMaximus 2283 days ago
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.19.20038844v...

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/1/2/e000234

https://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h3480.full

link
Jamesbeam 2283 days ago
Ok cool, you give me three links.

The first one says

This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.

The second one has a sample size of less than thousand people and concludes "Self-diagnosis does not accurately predict influenza seropositivity"

The third one is the only one that has a good set of data in terms of sample size ( 50+ Million ) but concludes "Symptom checkers had deficits in both triage and diagnosis" and that said I have no idea if those websites need some kind of verification as well, so if not someone who's bored could have just added bogus data to that as well.

I am not sure what's your point.

link