Lately, social media has been flooded with people sharing studies about various aspects of COVID. This is potentially great. I’m all for people being more engaged with science. Unfortunately, many people lack a good foundation for understanding science, and a common point of confusion is the meaning of “statistically significant.” I’ve written about this at length several times before (e.g., here and here), so for this post, I’m just trying to give a brief overview to hopefully clear up some confusion. In short, “statistically significant” means that there is a low probability that a result as great or greater than the observed result could arise by chance. Statistical tests are designed to show you how likely it is that the sample in a study is representative of the entire population from which the sample was taken. I’ll elaborate on what that means below (don’t worry, I’m not going to…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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