After users began observing a trend in candle reviews, one researcher decided to find out if it held any significance.
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After users began observing a trend in candle reviews, one researcher decided to find out if it held any significance.
tommy/Getty Images
Over the course of the pandemic, social media sleuths, epidemiologists and health nerds alike began noticing an interesting trend in the review section for Yankee candles on Amazon.
Whenever there was an influx of negative reviews citing no smell, there was usually a spike in COVID cases to go along with it.
fresh wave of bad reviews for yankee candles pic.twitter.com/1mlandB78I
— drewtoothpaste (@drewtoothpaste) December 21, 2021
Losing your sense of smell is one of the more recognized symptoms of an infection. After noticing this trend, people began to ask: could the reviews themselves be a reliable indicator of a surge in the virus?
That theory was put under the microscope, and has taken on new relevance amid concern at the lack of official data tracking infections across the U.S. heading into another winter.
How a review became a warning sign
Nick Beauchamp is an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University and first caught wind of the Yankee Candle theory late last year.
He decided it wouldn’t be too difficult to find out if there was actually a link. And having focused on previous projects that attempted to predict COVID cases using social media data, he sought to create a model to test it.
“I just thought, well, it’s easy enough…