Like a lot of people, I’ve been glued to various media channels trying to learn about the latest with what is going on with COVID-19. I have also been frustrated - like a lot of people - with misinformation and the deluge of preprints and peer reviewed material. Some of this information is critically important and some is hard to trust.
As a biostatistician at a very visible school of public health I have also had a number of media outreaches, but I’ve been hesitant to do any interviews or talk about COVID-19. The reason is that even thought I have a PhD in Biostatistics and I work in a School of Public Health I actually know very little about infectious disease modeling and response. I think if you aren’t really deep in the field, its difficult to know the difference between someone like me and someone with real expertise.
While I’m not an expert in the area, I know many of the real experts professionally or by reputation. So I thought I’d make a brief list of people and organizations I find credible and have been following for good information in case it is helpful to others. Many of these folks have already been found by audiences much bigger than ours but I just thought it would be useful to amplify further their work.
Paper review
Infectious disease modeling
- Trevor Bedford - Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center expert in phylogenetic modeling of infectious disease, his viz work and sober analysis is one of my go-tos.
- Justin Lessler - infectious disease professor and epidemiologist at Hopkins who did some of the earliest studies of contact tracing in China.
- Kate Grabowski - infectious disease professor and epidemiologist at Hopkins
- Nicholas Reich - UMass expert in infectious disease modeling, doing a great job of aggregating and evaluating disease models.
- Natalie Dean - University of Florida expert statistician in vaccine clinical trials - also one of my favorite pragmatic reviewers of big papers.
Vaccine development
- Derek Lowe - drug discovery chemist and blogger who is one of the best out there at distilling progress on vaccines.
- Ellie Murray - Boston University expert epidemiologist professor and communicator, providing clear understandable breakdowns of the best practices.
- Lucy D’Agostino McGowan - Vanderbilt statistics professor and communicator who does an amazing job of breaking down difficult stats and causal inference issues.
- Carl Bergstrom - UW Biology Professor and infectious disease expert, providing sober reviews and interactions around many of the papers coming out.
Policy
- Tom Ingelsby - Professor and director of Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has been producing solid analysis and policy recommendations on when to re-open.
- Caitlin Rivers - Professor at the Hopkins Center for Health Security, outbreak specialist, also producing solid analysis and policy recommendations.
- Andy Slavitt - Ex-Obama health care head and providing solid policy reviews and ideas.
- Josh Sharfstein - Professor of the Practice at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has a great public health podcast with lots of experts on it.
- Keshia Pollack-Porter - Professor of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has a great take on mobility issues associated with Covid-19.
- Lisa Cooper - Bloomberg Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has great content on inequality of impact.
I’m sure I’ve missed great people to mention as I’ve dashed this off pretty quickly so apologies if I missed you!