Tall People Aren’t More Likely to Catch COVID-19

Tracy Davenport

Health

4th August 2020

Tall People Aren’t More Likely to Catch COVID-19

The study is based on correlation, not causation (Getty Images).

The Claim

People over six feet tall are more susceptible to catching COVID-19.

News posted on

New York Post

Naija

David Strunk

Emerging story

On July 15, 2020, medRxiv published a paper documenting a survey of 2000 individuals in the US and UK related to predictors of COVID-19 transmission. In the paper, height was reported to be a predictor of COVID-19 transmission, with people over 6 feet tall or taller more likely to contract the virus. Media outlets then circulated reports that taller people may be at a higher risk of becoming infected with COVID-19 and social media users further spread the information.

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Misbar’s Analysis

Misbar has discovered that the findings related to height and COVID-19 were published in a preprint server for health sciences. In the medRxiv publication, it clearly states that the new medical research presented has not yet been evaluated and should not be used to guide clinical practice. This research has not been published in any academic journal. In order to be published in a scholarly journal, these findings would have to go through a process of peer review where experts in the field would verify the methods and assumptions that led to the conclusions.

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The unpublished study found “weak” evidence linking a person’s height with an increased risk of COVID-19 infection. While the authors suggested that a relationship between height and risk might stem from aerosol transmission of the virus, the data from this study would not be adequate to make such conclusions. Assuming so would override the statistical idea of correlation does not imply causation, which means that you cannot legitimately deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables. In other words, if in the researchers’ survey, more people with brown hair contracted the virus compared to those with blond hair, it would not make sense to say those with brown hair are more likely to contract COVID-19. A much more rigorous scientific methodology would be necessary to jump to such a conclusion.

The data from this study was also collected at a distance by a survey that took place over the first week of June 2020, through a third-party survey company over the phone or personal computers (not face to face) therefore the actual height of the participants was not verified. The survey took on average five minutes to complete.

Some would say that these findings are more evidence supporting aerosol transmission of COVID-19. Basically, instead of the virus spreading just through droplets that hit the ground, it could also be spread through aerosol rising. From this study, it is false to assume that tall people are more likely to get the COVID-19 virus.