Summary: the researchers used covid case counts in each country to draw conclusions as to what languages spread it most easily. Countries where the dominate language uses “aspirated consonants” also had most covid cases per capita.
So a few things:
the paper was first published in June 2020, so not a ton of time to collect accurate data.
why trust each country to be honest with their covid reporting, let alone the problem with diff labs/countries use diff cycle threshold for PCR tests.
The news article headline is a bit sensational, singling out english. The research highlights languages with “aspirated consonants” not just english.
a little old but holly shit :-p https://web.archive.org/web/20210110232434/https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisonescalante/2020/09/08/why-speaking-english-may-spread-more-coronavirus-than-other-languages/
And the research paper the article is sourced from:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7263261/
Summary: the researchers used covid case counts in each country to draw conclusions as to what languages spread it most easily. Countries where the dominate language uses “aspirated consonants” also had most covid cases per capita.
So a few things:
From the article:
“ Technically these numbers did not achieve statistical significance, but the observation is interesting nonetheless.”