Amplifying people I trust on COVID-19

Jeff Leek
2020-04-29

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

Vaccine development

Scicom and public outreach

Policy

I’m sure I’ve missed great people to mention as I’ve dashed this off pretty quickly so apologies if I missed you!