Almost every day we seem to get new data about the COVID crisis. Whether it’s infection rates, death rates, testing rates, false-negative rates, there’s a lot of information to cull through. Making sense of COVID data is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with Megan Price and Maria Gargiulo.

Megan Price is the Executive Director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, Price designs strategies and methods for statistical analysis of human rights data for projects in a variety of locations including Guatemala, Colombia, and Syria. Her work in Guatemala includes serving as the lead statistician on a project in which she analyzed documents from the National Police Archive; she has also contributed analyses submitted as evidence in two court cases in Guatemala. Her work in Syria includes serving as the lead statistician and author on three reports, commissioned by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR), on documented deaths in that country. @StatMegan

Maria Gargiulo is a statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. She has conducted field research on intimate partner violence in Nicaragua and was a Civic Digital Fellow at the United States Census Bureau. She holds a B.S. in statistics and data science and Spanish literature from Yale University. She is also an avid tea drinker. You can find her on Twitter @thegargiulian.

Timestamps

2:55 What’s the reaction been?

11:10 How important is the information in supporting these decisions.

14:30 What stories are we missing?

18:14 Schools and Covid

23:30 How to Make Sense of all of the COVID data