I have no doubt that there is a correlation and I did read the Bayesian Vector Autoregression paper. However, I think it's a bit misleading for a doctor to take to social media with some <i>very</i> casual observations of Amazon reviews and make confident claims that covid is about to "surge" so therefore we should all return to masking. I need a lot more than just his screenshots of the reviews. I need to see the cases actually surging. They aren't in most of the world. One of his "no scent" reviews was actually just a subjective review that the scent isn't strong enough. The others were from a week ago. His linked article claims "COVID-19 cases predicted more “no smell” reviews. For every 100,000 new COVID-19 cases per week, he found, “no smell” reviews increased by a quarter of a percentage point in the next week." So shouldn't we have seen this surge already?<p>This just feels sloppy to me.