Coronavirus May Have been in the US for Weeks

An article on MSN stated: “The coronavirus has been circulating undetected and has possibly infected scores of people over the past six weeks in Washington state, according to a genetic analysis of virus samples that has sobering implications for the entire country amid heightening anxiety about the likely spread of the disease.

The researchers conducted genetic sequencing of two virus samples. One is from a patient who traveled from China to Snohomish County in mid-January and was the first person diagnosed with the disease in the United States. The other came from a recently diagnosed patient in the same county, a high school student with no travel-related or other known exposure to the coronavirus. The two samples look almost identical genetically, said Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who announced the results of the research on Twitter late Saturday night.“

So I read the guy’s 9-part tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/sta...70271318503426

The guy does not understand p-value, which is based on degrees of freedom. A p-value is the probability that the result you got (or more extreme result) assuming the null hypothesis is true. It is the area under the curve. For example, it is the probability that the result you got was purely due to randomness.

That must have been so embarrassing typo. The guy meant probability of 2/59 not p-value.