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COVID cases: How candle reviews could be an early warning sign A theory about
online candle reviews and COVID cases was put under the microscope, and has
taken on new relevance amid concern at the lack of official data heading into
another winter.
   
   
   NPR
 * subscribe to Short Wave podcast
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    * RSS link


SCIENCE


WHY DID HE SUSPECT A COVID SURGE WAS COMING? HE FOLLOWED THE DIGITAL BREADCRUMBS

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 * Twitter
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October 16, 20227:00 AM ET

Manuela López Restrepo

Enlarge this image

After users began observing a trend in candle reviews, one researcher decided to
find out if it held any significance. tommy/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption
tommy/Getty Images


After users began observing a trend in candle reviews, one researcher decided to
find out if it held any significance.

tommy/Getty Images

Over the course of the pandemic, social media sleuths, epidemiologists and
health nerds alike began noticing an interesting trend in the review section for
Yankee candles on Amazon.

Whenever there was an influx of negative reviews citing no smell, there was
usually a spike in COVID cases to go along with it.




> fresh wave of bad reviews for yankee candles pic.twitter.com/1mlandB78I
> 
> — drewtoothpaste (@drewtoothpaste) December 21, 2021

Losing your sense of smell is one of the more recognized symptoms of an
infection. After noticing this trend, people began to ask: could the reviews
themselves be a reliable indicator of a surge in the virus?

That theory was put under the microscope, and has taken on new relevance amid
concern at the lack of official data tracking infections across the U.S. heading
into another winter.


HOW A REVIEW BECAME A WARNING SIGN

Nick Beauchamp is an associate professor of political science at Northeastern
University and first caught wind of the Yankee Candle theory late last year.

He decided it wouldn't be too difficult to find out if there was actually a
link. And having focused on previous projects that attempted to predict COVID
cases using social media data, he sought to create a model to test it.

Sponsor Message



"I just thought, well, it's easy enough to do. Maybe I'll just try scraping some
Amazon reviews and see what the actual trends are, as opposed to just cutting
and pasting a few reviews that mention a lack of smell," Beauchamp said.

Enlarge this image

Yankee candles sold on Amazon became an unlikely part of the conversation on
COVID rates and how they are tracked. John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images
hide caption

toggle caption
John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images


Yankee candles sold on Amazon became an unlikely part of the conversation on
COVID rates and how they are tracked.

John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images

To his surprise, the relationship was clear; COVID cases followed a very similar
pattern to the frequency of the reviews.




> Here's a plot of the "no smell" complaints for the top three Yankee Candles on
> Amazon. pic.twitter.com/EFUsGil5k4
> 
> — Nick Beauchamp (@nick_beauchamp) December 22, 2021

Beauchamp's initial tweets on the findings in December 2021 went viral as well,
and he scrambled to add more data to find a definitive answer. By mid-January,
he had written a paper and submitted it to a journal, and by June of this year
it had been published.

"It's a very small paper, but it's one that I think has caught a lot of people's
interest, particularly because it's trying to do slightly more carefully
something that a lot of people have been noticing qualitatively on Twitter," he
said.

Ultimately, the results from the paper showed that COVID cases were predictive
of the reviews, meaning that if there was a recorded surge in COVID cases, there
would likely be an increase in the negative reviews. But could it work the other
way around?

"The other thing that I was trying to find was, 'Can we predict COVID cases
using the reviews?' And what we found was that at least up through December of
2021, not really. Using the past COVID cases to predict future COVID cases is
pretty good, and you can't really do any better using the reviews."



But then something happened. After adding more months of data to his model in
June this year, he found that the relationship between the reviews and COVID
rates had swapped again: the reviews were now predictive of COVID rates.


HEALTH


ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COULD SOON DIAGNOSE ILLNESS BASED ON THE SOUND OF YOUR
VOICE

In other words, the rise in negative reviews might actually be an earlier
warning sign than the official COVID data.

"That is either due to lack of measurement of COVID, or worse measurements of
COVID, or maybe something else changing. I presume the reviews themselves
weren't changing very much," Beauchamp said.

One interesting reaction Beauchamp observed was the tweets and the study itself
have evolved into their own meta-data sets, gaining popularity again when users
are noticing a surge in COVID cases.

Some researchers refer to these trends as "digital breadcrumbs," because online
activity, like searches, interacting with old Twitter threads, or in this case,
leaving a review, can give unique insight into a person's real life
circumstances.

As for Beauchamp, he maintains a healthy level of skepticism for the study, even
with all of his controls.


WHY SOME BELIEVE THE OFFICIAL DATA IS A "BIG MESS"

These days, the quality of COVID tracking has become a cause for concern for
Beauchamp and other experts working with public health data, especially as
President Joe Biden declared the pandemic "over".

"The traditional data sources are getting worse. The CDC is sort of cutting back
on its measurements. Everybody's measuring themselves less frequently. They're
reporting these things to government agencies less frequently," Beauchamp said.

He also cited reduced wastewater measurements, and said the frequent attention
on the Yankee Candle reviews was an example of how many people were still
invested in tracking COVID numbers.

"Those of us who sort of still care about and worry about the pandemic, and
don't think that it's over, are grasping around for other sources of data that
can be used to track new waves and that sort of thing," he added.


SHORT WAVE


IVF HAS COME A LONG WAY, BUT MANY DON'T HAVE ACCESS

Abraar Karan is an infectious disease doctor and researcher at Stanford
University and said the evolving nature of the virus had made it difficult to
pinpoint and sustain the most efficient ways of collecting and analyzing COVID
data, especially three years into the pandemic.

"If we look back to the beginning of the epidemic, every case that we were
documenting mattered a lot. And we were trying to figure out what to do with
that data," Karan said.

As time passed, new issues presented themselves, like reinfections and how to
document them. Karan also cited the reduction of testing and its
decentralization as other hurdles. Many people have stopped testing frequently,
if at all, and those choosing to test at home often do not report their results
to public health departments.

Enlarge this image

At-home tests have been useful for many, but have also decentralized the
documentation of positive results. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images


At-home tests have been useful for many, but have also decentralized the
documentation of positive results.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

But at this point in the pandemic, Karan said tracking some key sources, even if
they were less robust than years prior, had proved to be an effective strategy,
given the breadth of data that is available from past years.

He said observing trends in reported cases was the clearest method, as long as
there was no recent shift in the amount of testing available.

"The most relevant question I get asked, as a doctor or epidemiologist, is,
'What is the risk of me doing X activity to contract SARS-CoV-2?' And frankly,
you can really largely at this point, answer that based on the [trend] activity,
and less so on what's going on around you, because the data is a big mess," he
said.

Karan also noted that wastewater data could be immensely useful, even if it was
not very precise in measuring case numbers.


GOATS AND SODA


CORONAVIRUS (BOOSTER) FAQ: CAN IT CAUSE A POSITIVE TEST? WHEN SHOULD YOU GET IT?

Ultimately, Karan said a combination of data sources could help experts and
regular folks make the best decisions for themselves in regards to their COVID
safety.

"People are constantly weighing these risks and benefits based on limited data,
but data nonetheless. So you can triangulate a lot of things, like all the
things we just talked about to get somewhat of an assessment of where we are
with new variants," he said.

And when it comes to including the Yankee candle data in the mix?

"These kinds of things are used in public health more for research. But at this
point in COVID, I don't think candle reviews are going to change our public
health strategy," he said.

Instead, it could be an indication that there is more untouched data online that
could be useful for the common good. And if there is, Beauchamp is all for it.

"It's better to join together in some sort of movement here, if we can," he
said. "So I'm happy to be a small part of that."

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