Posts Tagged ‘ Coronavirus ’

During this coronavirus pandemic, there are many COVID-related graphs and curves in the news and on social media. The public, politicians, and pundits scrutinize each day's graphs to determine which communities are winning the fight against coronavirus. Interspersed among these many graphs is the oft-repeated mantra, "Flatten the curve!" As

The post Read more »

A previous article describes the funnel plot (Spiegelhalter, 2005), which can identify samples that have rates or proportions that are much different than expected. The funnel plot is a scatter plot that plots the sample proportion of some quantity against the size of the sample. The variance of the sample

The post Read more »

Death is always a difficult topic to discuss, and death has been in the news a lot during this tragic coronavirus pandemic. Many news stories focus on states, counties, or cities that have the most cases or the most deaths. A related statistic is the case fatality rate, which is

The post Read more »

Every day we face risks. If we drive to work, we risk a fatal auto accident. If we eat red meat and fatty foods, we risk a heart attack. If we go out in public during a pandemic, we risk contracting a disease. A logical response to risk is to

The post Read more »

During an epidemic, such as the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the media often shows graphs of the cumulative numbers of confirmed cases for different countries. Often these graphs use a logarithmic scale for the vertical axis. In these graphs, a straight line indicates that new cases are increasing at an

The post Read more »