Show HN: Analyze Covid-19 immune passports self-infection data – Statwing YC S12

(Putting this in a separate comment because it’s a bit meta, and not about the dataset itself)

This “here’s an interesting dataset to play with” approach might ring a bell with some folks here. Statwing was a YC S12 company, and we were acquired by Qualtrics in 2016. We used to try to find interesting datasets and stick them into Statwing, like the Stack Overflow survey of software developers discussed on this HN thread[1].

It’s 2020, and @lejohnq and I (and a team of other socially-minded engineers) are still working on Statwing (now called Stats iQ). We were looking for a way that we could do something (anything!) useful to help with COVID-19, and realized that we could apply that old approach to interesting public health-related questions.

So, yes, there is an element of “we hope people play with Stats iQ, like it, and then sign up to use it professionally on their data or want to work with us (we’re hiring)” But I can assure you that we personally stand almost nothing to gain financially from this, and that the primary reason we care about ROI on this is so we can justify doing more work like this in the future.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7874289

There was a lot of discussion in the early days of the pandemic about “immunity passports” (also called “immunity certificates”), which would allow individuals who had recovered from COVID-19 to live with fewer restrictions than others. Some proposals were limited to more high-risk situations--for example, an eldercare facility might require immunity certificates for its employees.[1]

That conversation was derailed because it was initially unclear whether recovering actually yielded immunity from further disease and infection[2]. The scientific consensus is now that at least some degree of immunity will be conferred[3], so this conversation could re-emerge, as in a report produced by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and backed by former UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt[4]

Assuming that the various technical and scientific hurdles could be overcome, there would still be one fuzzier objection---that such passports would create a perverse incentive for some folks to intentionally seek out infection so as to obtain these privileges.

We wondered if that objection was well-founded. So we surveyed 1,000 Americans, asking them whether they’d seek out infection in order to be granted certain privileges, like the ability to attend large gatherings or be employed at an eldercare facility.

A quick report of a few findings is in this footnote[5]. But, at least to me, just as interesting as the top-level finding is the why, the correlates of that willingness.

We put the data into Stats iQ (formerly Statwing, YC S12), an easy-to-use, cloud-based statistical analysis tool, so anyone can analyze it. It’s a fascinating dataset, and it contains some interesting findings that we didn’t actually set out to learn about (e.g., it turns out that about as many people were happy as sad to have been stuck at home for a few months, and that sentiment was associated with gender and parenthood).

We hope you find it to be as interesting as we have, even if some of the findings are, frankly, a bit dark.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765836 [2] https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/health/coronavirus-immuni... [4] https://institute.global/policy/taking-uk-testing-strategy-n... (The report advocates for health passports generally, in which antibody testing would supplement mass testing generally) [5] https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/americans-seek-covid-infectio...