BAD SCIENCE #1: Nisreen Alwan, A Covid-19 survivor based on her self diagnosis

Nisreen is a specialist in public health at Southampton University. She is concerned about the quality of life of people who have had a Covid-19 infection. Being classed as recovered is not enough she says, and we need to look more at recurring health problems associated with the disease.

This was an introduction to the subsection of The Science Hour podcast, titled “Putin’s Coivid-19 vaccine” (BBC World Service: 16.8.2020). Reporting on COVID is a mess. It is impossible always to expect an objective reporting from the journalists who struggle to keep up with the everchanging facts and fallacies in the Covid-19 research. To be honest, even medical specialists strive. But the standards of scientific reporting should be held higher for the podcast that calls itself The Science Hour. In the episode that was aired on 16.8.2020 they failed miserably and here is why.

Nisreen argues that a simplistic “death” vs “recovery” binary statistic is far too simplistic to show the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic. The recovery complications and longterm health conditions due to the virus infection is an interesting topic worth researching, but from here, everything goes wrong. Nisreen says: “I think I had Covid-19, back in the second half of March. I had symptoms, and then they did not go away until this day. I am thankfully much better and better than many other people who I hear accounts of in terms of having similar experiences, but I am closely back to normal.” She couldn’t exercise much and found even a simple housework tiring for months after initial infection with Covid-19. Oh, wait, we do not know if it was Covid-19 since Nisreen never took the test.
She had fatigue, chest heaviness, chest pressure, leg pains, shoulder pain; she claims those symptoms did not fit into anything else. But that is untrue. According to Baum’s Textbook of pulmonary diseases, those symptoms are common in different lungs infections.

Some people also report cognitive problems, memory problems, brain fogs etc. to which she responds: “Fortunately I haven’t experienced those or maybe I had but maybe mildly and I am putting that to age.” If she is unable to say for sure, she had the symptom of cognitive problem why speculate? Why adding to the confusion? Regarding severity of her symptoms, she says: “I wouldn’t call my symptoms severe”.

It is evident that Nisreen Alwan tries to build up a motivation for her research based on personal experience that has no proof except for her subjective experience of the disease. She has speculatively connected those symptoms with Covid-19 and now tries to ride the Covid-19 hype to execute her research that would include “me and other sufferers”.

Do not get me wrong; her suffering might be an exciting insight to try and understand this pesky virus. She does a good argument at her blog (although I would not use the word detrimental): “As a public health doctor and epidemiologist, I strongly think we must now clearly define and measure “recovery” from covid-19. This way, we can quantify non-death health outcomes and monitor long-term implications of the virus. The definition needs to be more sophisticated than just hospital discharge or testing negative for the virus. It must take into account symptom duration, fluctuation, overall functionality and quality of life in comparison to before infection. If we do not have enough information to define “mild” at this stage, then let us not use the term loosely; otherwise, it is detrimental to pandemic control.”

However, the way she presented her case in The Science Hour shows the unscientific approach of ignoring all the golden postulates of modern science: reliance on observation, explanatory power, universality and objectivity. None of this was met in her maybe infection with Covid-19.

The fact that the presenter did not question her approach I found disappointing, but in the age where even science tends to be fuelled with emotion in order to get funding, I am not surprised.