We are very happy to announce the first talk organized by the UMBC ASA student chapter, which marks the beginning of the spring graduate student seminar series. The details of the talk are given below and are also available in our website https://community.amstat.org/umbc/events.

Title:  Using what you have: Infectious disease surveillance with limited data and tight timelines

Abstract:  The COVID-19 pandemic continues to generate a flurry of reports, models, and projections as well as a wave of increased interest in epidemiology and infectious disease surveillance. In this presentation, we will review some classic ideas from disease surveillance, probability, and statistics and the roles these play (or don’t play) in an ongoing pandemic. In the urgency of the situation, some old ideas are being rediscovered and others ignored, some new tools are providing new insight, and new opportunities abound for statistical thinking in monitoring, analyzing, and understanding large-scale data streams. We will discuss the relationships between individual-level testing and public-level interpretations as well as the role of statistical thinking in new developments in data science. Our goal is to work towards building intuition around seemingly conflicting reports and interpretations. Examples include interpretation of testing data and assessments of equity in placement of and access to testing sites.