When coronavirus numbers start piling up, it gets to be a little overwhelming. I spoke with an infectious disease expert about trials of tracking this data, how she plucks insight from it, and what we need to look for over the next year.
“I’m an infectious disease modeler, that is to say I take data driven analysis and build mathematical models to try and understand as to why a disease is emerging in a population and how it might develop over time," said Ana Isabel Bento, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at Indiana University, Bloomington.
She has worked with all sorts of diseases, from the flu to Ebola. When the pandemic started, it was all hands on deck for researchers like her at Indiana University and around the world.
In the beginning, we were all just counting the total number of cases, but the total number of cases can only provide us with so much information.
