Coronavirus Research
"Also, reading 500 coronavirus papers in a row and not sleeping? Probably not great for you either, but I haven't found any studies confirming that yet. I'll keep looking."
"Also, reading 500 coronavirus papers in a row and not sleeping? Probably not great for you either, but I haven't found any studies confirming that yet. I'll keep looking."
This comic is the seventh comic in a row in a series of comics about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Megan, disheveled and exhausted, has been researching COVID-19 nonstop and is now reporting her findings to Cueball. She claims to have read all available literature on the subject, but the best she can come up with is an extremely basic fact about viruses—namely that they infect cells and this is bad and should be prevented, which Cueball and just about everybody else already knew. She enthusiastically replies that she now knows this with error bars, which are graphical representations of the variability of data and are used on graphs to indicate the error or uncertainty in a reported measurement. Perhaps because of her sleep deprivation, she is unable to process the information that she has read, or is unable to properly phrase it in words. This is not the first time that Megan has exhaustively researched a topic to the detriment of her own health, see 1708: Dehydration.
In the title text, she has a hunch that staying awake long enough to read 500 scientific papers is probably not a good idea, but she hasn't found a study that specifically confirms that. She intends to further compound her exhaustion by continuing to do research rather than just getting some much-needed sleep. Assuming that Megan averages half an hour to find and read each paper, she has been continuously reading for 10.4 days, which is approaching Randy Gardner's world record for not sleeping (11 days and 25 minutes).