From the other side of the consultation, briefly. The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated. Those two sets overlap less than the confident tone of most write-ups suggests, and the second set is where nearly all the disagreement on this board comes from.

Correct me if the detail matters more than I have assumed.

quinn_sf said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

Coming at quinn_sf’s question from a different direction. It helps to ask what evidence would change your mind before you look at any. If nothing would, the discussion is not about evidence, and it is better to say so early than to spend nine posts discovering it.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a trend.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

What would you measure differently if you were starting again?

Moderator note: good thread. Keeping it here rather than moving it, because the question is general enough to be useful. Thread quality here is what the rules are for. Keep it up.