Three potential challenges in studying COVID-19 pandemic data: Chinese statistics, social media, and preprint servers

Coronavirus (COVID-19), which started in Wuhan, China, in early December 2019, has now become the biggest challenge to health for almost all countries in the world. On January 31, 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a public health emergency, and then on March 11, COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic. To overcome this worldwide outbreak, scientists and health policy makers around the world have tried to implement prevention strategies (e.g., home isolation, travel restrictions, social distancing, etc.) or have begun research projects for the development of a vaccine and new drugs against this novel coronavirus. Many studies are already focusing on the epidemic, the mechanism of the novel coronavirus, the medication, the epidemiology of infection, etc., and most scientific journals have begun fast-tracking manuscripts regarding COVID-19; many papers have been published since the epidemic began. However, there are some challenges....