Retraction of: Scientific Reports https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-84092-1, published online 05 March 2021
The Editors have retracted this Article.
Following publication of this Article concerns have been raised about the methodological approach developed by the Authors to evaluate the impact of stay-at-home policies on the reduction of COVID-19-related fatalities. In particular, Meyerowitz-Katz et al.1 show that the approach fails to detect any signal when tested on a synthetic dataset where the ground truth is known, and under specific cases of data subsetting. In addition, Meyerowitz-Katz et al.1 failed to replicate the original results using a synthetic dataset. These suggest that the false negative rate of the approach is prohibitively high to allow for meaningful conclusions to be drawn regarding the impact of stay-at-home policies on COVID-19 fatality rates. The results of Meyerowitz-Katz et al.1 are further confirmed by Góes2 who, using a pure correlation analysis, shows that the coefficients for the impact of stay-at-home policies using the methodological approach developed by the Authors can be zero even with diametrically opposing indices of staying-at-home. Given these concerns, the Editors no longer have confidence that the conclusions presented are adequately supported.
R.S. Savaris, G. Pumi, J. Dalzochio and R. Kunst do not agree with this retraction.
References
Meyerowitz-Katz, G., Besançon, L., Flahault, A. & Wimmer, R. Impact of mobility reduction on COVID-19 mortality: absence of evidence might be due to methodological issues. Sci. Rep. 11, 23533. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02461-2 (2021).
Góes, C. Pairwise difference regressions are just weighted averages. Sci. Rep. 11, 23044. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02096-3 (2021).
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Savaris, R.S., Pumi, G., Dalzochio, J. et al. Retraction Note: Stay-at-home policy is a case of exception fallacy: an internet-based ecological study. Sci Rep 11, 24172 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-03250-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-03250-7
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