WYSO is partnering with Stats and Stories, a podcast produced at Miami University.
As the COVID-19 death toll continues to rise researchers and public health professionals around the world are working to understand just how prevalent the disease is. News stories of the last several months have talked about contact tracing and featured images of drive-through COVID testing. One of the issues that’s come up with testing is whether we should test people who don’t show signs of infection. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories.
Rosemary Pennington and regular panelists John Bailer and Richard Campbell are joined by two guests to talk about COVID. The first is Nick Fisher who worked at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization for 32 years before founding the research consulting firm Value Metrics. Fisher is also a visiting professor at the University of Sydney. The second guest is Dennis Trewin of Dennis Trewin Statistical Consulting. Before founding his company Trewin worked as a government statistician for 35 years, eventually heading the Australian Bureau of Statistics from 2000 to 2007. Fisher and Trewin penned an op-ed together arguing that to really get a handle on the burden of infection in the COVID-19 pandemic, we have to start randomly testing people for the disease.
Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter or iTunes. If you'd like to share your thoughts on our program, send your e-mail to statsandstories@miamioh.edu and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.