Scientists can’t develop a null hypothesis about the impact of the most studied virus in the history of humanity? If you have no null hypothesis then you shouldn’t be drawing conclusions from data, period.
Anyone who reads this site regularly is probably aware of the problems with non-registered data analyses in academia (often referred to as the “replication crisis”).
We should be incredibly skeptical of any non-registered analysis, even when sample controls are used. When the study is unregistered AND the sample is uncontrolled the default posture should way beyond skepticism - it should be considered meaningless until reproduced by a better-structured analysis.
Anyone who reads this site regularly is probably aware of the problems with non-registered data analyses in academia (often referred to as the “replication crisis”). We should be incredibly skeptical of any non-registered analysis, even when sample controls are used. When the study is unregistered AND the sample is uncontrolled the default posture should way beyond skepticism - it should be considered meaningless until reproduced by a better-structured analysis.