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Abstract:
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The novel virus SARS-CoV-2 has produced a global pandemic, forcing doctors and policymakers to “fly blind,” trying to deal with a virus and disease they knew virtually nothing about. Sorting through the information in real time has been a daunting process—processing data, media reports, commentaries, and research articles. In the USA this is exacerbated by an ideologically divided society that has difficulty with mutual trust, or even agreement on common facts. The skills underlying our statistical profession are central to this knowledge discovery process, filtering out biases, aggregating disparate data sources together, dealing with measurement error and missing data, identifying key insights while quantifying the uncertainty in these insights, and then communicating the results in an accessible balanced way. As a result, statisticians have a central role to play in society to bring our perspective and expertise to bear on the pandemic to help ensure knowledge is efficiently discovered and communicated to policymakers to put it into practice and the media to accurately inform the public. Unfortunately, our profession is often shy about asserting its perspective in broader societal ventures, perhaps not realizing the central importance of our perspective and mindset. In this roundtable, we will discuss how statisticians can seek more visibility and impact at the societal level, and push for a seat at the table with societal decision makers. Throughout the pandemic, I have authored a blog page https://covid-datascience.com in my own personal effort to analyze the emerging information and communicate reliable insights supported by the data and studies to the public, and for the first time in my professional career have done a large number of media appearances on TV, radio, podcasts, and print media, and am glad to discuss what I have learned from these experiences.
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