Covid-19 does NOT cause heart damage, as blockbuster study had basic calculation error
Just over a month ago, a paper from Germany entitled, ‘Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)’, was published in the journal JAMA Cardiology. It was based on 100 people recently recovered from Covid-19, who underwent MRI scans to find factors associated with damage to their hearts.
The only problem with the conclusion of the paper is that almost every piece of data given to support it was wrong. As more and more media breathlessly reported that Covid-19 will eventually kill everyone with heart attacks, the mathematically minded on Twitter – including Darrel Francis, a Professor of Cardiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute – began to point out obvious miscalculations and mismatches in the results of the study.
The authors appeared to confuse medians for means, and data points present in the graphs were absent elsewhere. In essence, the paper was riddled with remedial mistakes that the first few hundreds of thousands of people who read it (or scan the last few sentences) failed to notice.
