What Was This Thread About?
I began writing this series of posts as a way of systematizing a number of ideas—some of them mere discomforts—that I’ve been accumulating as I’ve learned to to do technical/statistical/data-driven work in COVID-19 epidemiology over the course of the past year or so. I don’t exactly know what to do with these ideas: not being a trained life scientist, I don’t have a great track record at writing life science papers, and in any event I’m not certain that the things that I’ve discussed in the past few posts could be fit comfortably in a “real” scientific paper. There isn’t a lot of data in what I’ve discussed, for one thing (which makes it a weird thing for a “data scientist” to be trafficking in!). On the other hand, I do think that I have seen a few things that have value, and uncovered some unexamined assumptions that really need to be held up to sunlight. So the best I can think to do for now is blog them, and hopefully get the parts of the ideas that turn out not to be wrong into scientific discussions.
I’ve pretty much emptied the sack at this point, so I’m not planning to keep on writing more of these, unless I notice anything else. What I’d like to do today is draw up a coherent summary of where we stand with respect to breakthroughs, vaccines, Omicron, and the state of epidemic surveillance, drawing on the last four posts.