Can someone more knowledgeable than me about epidemiology please help debunk this?

[TinyGarden]

https://scitechdaily.com/are-dogs-spreading-sars-cov-2-study-finds-living-with-a-dog-increases-risk-of-contracting-covid-19/

So far this study has only been reported in such illustrious tomes as The Daily Mail and the Metro.

Actual study here:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935120311208?via%3Dihu

I know correlation is not causation and it looks like it's an online self report study. But would very much appreciate further scepticism from people who (unlike me) really know what they're talking about.

Not only cos I don't want to have to worry about my parents interacting with my dog (when it's allowed again). But also because it tries to paint an association between supermarket home deliveries and Covid.

Took me months to persuade my parents to go for online deliveries rather than pop to supermarkets!

[MedSchoolRat]

I was too harsh... I don't think it's a 'bad' study at all, not 'badly designed', but it is simply a survey of a sample of convenience without verification. What it can tell us with certainty needs to be put in context. There are buckets of things It can't say for certain. It works best as potential supporting evidence.

X-sectional is not actually at bottom of the hierarchy of evidence, just at the bottom of group observation studies, primary research.

Independent SAGE, btw, what they produce is at the very bottom. 'Expert opinion'. Remember that next time you wonder why Indie SAGE views don't carry much weight with a lot of scientists. All the atmospheric scientists going on about covid being airborne? That qualifies as mechanistic research most of what they do, computer & physics modelling etc. Case reports are basically anecdotes.

[orangenasturtium]

Although I appreciate the irony that I haven't bothered to give examples to substantiate that!

[orangenasturtium]

There is online grocery delivery available in Spain @PowerslidePanda. The question in the survey is:

Do you buy the essential commodities online (home delivery) or in-store?

So presumably they are referring to online grocery shopping rather than home delivery of goods bought in a supermarket, although the quote in the article contradicts that

I think everyone is pretty unanimous that it is a poorly designed survey with unreliable, self reported data from a selective group (mostly graduate students) that has been poorly analysed and makes some unsubstantiated claims.

[IrmaFayLear]

What I immediately thought upon reading this, is that who knows if they are telling the truth ?

You are asked whereabouts you think you contracted covid. You could have been in someone’s house, had a relative to visit, stopped to chat to a person when out and about and been quite close, you could have had a sneaky assignation.... but, no, you cast around and say, “Ah, it was the supermarket delivery” or “It must have been the dog!”

I know someone who caught covid. She was convinced it was an Amazon parcel. Convinced. It certainly wasn’t her partner who works in a factory and had a bit of a cough a week before she fell ill .

[MrsEricBana]

I too think that the dog walking correlation relates to the fact that the dog owner / walker goes out through potentially contaminated areas more than someone not needing to walk the dog rather than it being anything to do with the dog. Is a dog walking person potentially a greater risk to a vulnerable relative than someone who never leaves the house? Almost certainly. It makes sense to me that covid could be transferred from person to person via human cough droplets carried their fur (fomites) but I haven't read of any evidence for this. Therefore best not to let others stroke your dog in principle.

[QueenStromba]

[quote TinyGarden]@PowerslidePanda Gosh that's a huge difference in context isn't it, if in Spain 'home deliveries' often meant going to the store, picking products off the shelves then getting them delivered.

Reassuring for the U.K. context (where I'm not aware of that being a service - maybe it is for people without cars etc?).[/quote]
The only place I can think of the does it is Iceland.

[PowerslidePanda]

Yes - I don't think many countries have the order-online option that we do. And yes - if you think about the kind of people who would be using the kind of service they have in Spain, that probably explains the observed difference in risk - people who have to go to the supermarket via public transport rather than in their own car, people too frail to carry heavy bags, etc. The groceries themselves may be nothing to do with it.

No worries about the @ tagging - I do it all the time, I wasn't aware of the etiquette either!

[MissMatchedClaws]

Think others have pretty much said it, but cross sectional survey:
do people who remember walking their dog believe they took a risk, and therefore report that "yes, they 'think' they had COVID" more than people who know full well they were indoors the whole time? Without a decent outcome measure of actual infection, you can't tell.

Also, the confidence interval around the OR - the one for home delivery crosses 1. This tells you that the true difference between home delivery and not home delivery people is either less risk or more risk. So no difference. With walking the dog, the true difference in self-assessed COVID is from virtually none (odds of 1.03) to triple (3.07)

[TinyGarden]

PS. Sorry - actually just seen on another thread using the @ symbol is rude....didn't realise. Will try to bold / quote instead!

[TinyGarden]

@PowerslidePanda Gosh that's a huge difference in context isn't it, if in Spain 'home deliveries' often meant going to the store, picking products off the shelves then getting them delivered.

Reassuring for the U.K. context (where I'm not aware of that being a service - maybe it is for people without cars etc?).

[MereDintofPandiculation]

*Their significance threshold seems to be p < 0.1 (most studies like p

[PowerslidePanda]

A higher prevalence of the disease was also detected among those surveyed who had purchased their basic products at a supermarket and then used the home delivery service, compared to those who brought their shopping home themselves (the risk increased by 94% among the former group).

[PowerslidePanda]

Before everyone starts panicking about home deliveries, can I just point out that the way it works in Spain/in that study is not the same as in this country? They're talking about people who went to the supermarket themselves, picked up and paid for the items themselves and then paid the supermarket to deliver them, rather than taking them home themselves. And concluding that it's higher risk than taking your own shopping home (obviously, because it's the same process but with extra people involved!) It can't be compared to the risk of avoiding the supermarket altogether.

[QueenStromba]

@amicissimma

I don't have a dog and I don't have supermarket deliveries and I haven't had Covid.

There you are - conclusive!

(I thought the washing groceries thing had been discredited.)

Advice seems to be that you are unlikely to catch covid off your shopping but that giving it a wash won't hurt. Whether you wash your shopping is probably a decent proxy for how careful you're being in general.

[GreyishDays]

I also think it looks like a reasonable study, but being an environmental cross section type of thing they can’t account for factors separately. Eg people who was their groceries might also do something else protective.

Also yes to the dates of the study, they weren’t allowed to do anything else in that time I think. Wasn’t it Spain who had funny tales of hiring out dogs so people had an excuse to walk? So that could be people leaving the house, touching gates, speaking to other people etc.

[QueenStromba]

@orangenasturtium

As Gloschick said, the cases aren't confirmed as COVID 19.

It could be that dog walkers were leaving the house far more often than non dog owners. I believe exercise was not allowed during the lockdown. Assuming dog owners walk their dog at least once a day, they would be going out 7 times a week, meeting more people, spending more time in confined communal indoor spaces eg apartment lobbies and lifts, compared to once a week or never for many households.

However, it could also be that the dogs are acting as fomites, bringing in the virus from the pavement on their paws and spreading it through the home, on furniture and floors, touching people. Given that there is at least one confirmed case of a dog being infected with SARS CoV 19, it could be possible that there is dog to human transmission.

There is no way of knowing without further investigation.

It's not that surprising that home deliveries could be a greater risk than shopping in the supermarket. The number of contacts will be greater in a supermarket. However, the number of people who will have handled the food in the past 24 hours will probably be a lot greater for home deliveries (unpacking the delivery, picking the delivery, packing the delivery, and the driver), whereas many items in the supermarket will have been untouched for 24 hours or more. Also, all of the food will have been kept in a cold warehouse, then a refrigerated van, better conditions for spreading and preserving the virus than a supermarket. If my delivery drivers are anything to go by, they are often out of breath from unloading the shopping, so although you might spend less time in close contact with them than a check out assistant, it is a high risk contact, particularly if they are delivering to an apartment front door, so indoors and less well ventilated than a supermarket.

Or the people most in need of a supermarket delivery are people who are self isolating due to covid or suspected covid.

[Sb2012]

@amicissimma

I don't have a dog and I don't have supermarket deliveries and I haven't had Covid.

There you are - conclusive!

(I thought the washing groceries thing had been discredited.)

2 dogs and we do a lot of online supermarket deliveries (even before covid)
Also no covid here.

[TinyGarden]

Thanks @MedSchoolRat @orangenasturtium @SexTrainGlue

Love the divorce rate in Maine correlates with per capita margarine consumption

Thanks all for the critiquing.....this has cheered me up a little.

Does make you wonder how responsible the authors are in publishing - especially when you consider their bar for 'statistically significant' seems so low...

[MedSchoolRat]

There's a lot of bad covid research.

I'd like to leave it there, but here goes the longer version:
It's observational, based on self-diagnosis (!!) and self-reported behaviour. 44% of the respondents had post-grad degrees. Does that sound you like the average Spanish person?

I dunno what an elastic net model is, it seems to be a method for choosing covariates, they don't even bother to give a reference for this. Their significance threshold seems to be p < 0.1 (most studies like p

[orangenasturtium]

As Gloschick said, the cases aren't confirmed as COVID 19.

It could be that dog walkers were leaving the house far more often than non dog owners. I believe exercise was not allowed during the lockdown. Assuming dog owners walk their dog at least once a day, they would be going out 7 times a week, meeting more people, spending more time in confined communal indoor spaces eg apartment lobbies and lifts, compared to once a week or never for many households.

However, it could also be that the dogs are acting as fomites, bringing in the virus from the pavement on their paws and spreading it through the home, on furniture and floors, touching people. Given that there is at least one confirmed case of a dog being infected with SARS CoV 19, it could be possible that there is dog to human transmission.

There is no way of knowing without further investigation.

It's not that surprising that home deliveries could be a greater risk than shopping in the supermarket. The number of contacts will be greater in a supermarket. However, the number of people who will have handled the food in the past 24 hours will probably be a lot greater for home deliveries (unpacking the delivery, picking the delivery, packing the delivery, and the driver), whereas many items in the supermarket will have been untouched for 24 hours or more. Also, all of the food will have been kept in a cold warehouse, then a refrigerated van, better conditions for spreading and preserving the virus than a supermarket. If my delivery drivers are anything to go by, they are often out of breath from unloading the shopping, so although you might spend less time in close contact with them than a check out assistant, it is a high risk contact, particularly if they are delivering to an apartment front door, so indoors and less well ventilated than a supermarket.

[SexTrainGlue]

I've only skimmed it, but they appear to have omitted description of the population reguiations at the time they collected data from.

Spain was pretty strict, wasn't it? Not even exercise, but with an exception for talking dogs out for toilet walks. So it's possible that what it means is simply that 'those who go out in addition to necessary shopping, medical attention and permitted essential occupations had higher infection rates'

Or am I getting muddled with French/Italian restrictions? If so ignore me!!

[TunMahla]

Also, are not 'dog' people supposed to more often have an extroverted personality type and so socialise more? Speaking as an introverted 'cat' person ;).

[Gloschick]

The confidence interval crosses 1 for home delivery, which basically means it isn't statistically significant.

[TinyGarden]

I like your science @amicissimma

[TinyGarden]

Thanks @Gloschick for taking a look.

Yes, deffo no danger of rehoming! Just bit worried about my elderly parents.

It's strange as at the start of the summer there were loads of studies (or so I thought), that said pet transmission (whether via fur or other means) not a worry.

The supermarket deliveries thing is odd too.