Learning From COVID-19

People’s lives have been severely disrupted by COVID-19, with high numbers in hospitals and many deaths after the initial outbreak in China. If the efforts of many statistics educators were fulfilled to increase the number of statistically literate citizens who can make evidence-based decisions based on accurate data, we may have had lower infection and death rates. Unfortunately, the data is rather unreliable, especially with the use of self-testing and reporting. In this paper, we assert that statistics requires context to quantify risk. We present data and a summary of developments in Australia and England with the hope that case studies can be developed for students to understand risk better.