as a customer can t actually smell anything. it is not the candle company s fault you have covid. and this is not the first time this exact correlation has been spotted. a researcher at bryn mawr did a similar data scrape and found much the same results. and it is good to remember that we already use metrics sort of like this in public health all the time. it is not all that different than looking at places where lots of fevers start getting detected by smart thermometers and that gives you an inkling that something is going on there. but tracking people s complaints on the lack of delicious smelliness in their lives for their candle purchases, it is like a disconcerting cheery way to track a pandemic. but the bad candle reviews are going up and the numbers are going up and those things are related. and, you know, just the plain