Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychology professor who has devoted his career to making scientific data more reliable and trustworthy, is frustrated. Like everyone else, he's trying to understand the pandemic, particularly in his own community of Charlottesville, and in California, where he has family.
So he wonders: Where is the virus spreading? Where is it suppressed? Where are people social distancing as they should, and where are they not? Where will he and his family be safe?
In this pandemic, we're swimming in statistics, trends, models, projections, infection rates, death tolls. Nosek has professional expertise in interpreting data, but even he is struggling to make sense of the numbers.
“What's crazy is, we're three months in, and we're still not able to calibrate our risk management. It's a mess,” said Nosek, who runs the Center for Open Science, which advocates for transparency in research. “Tell me what to do! Please!”
Understanding the pandemic requires a combination of CAD drawing analysis for specific building shapes, modeling human movement, and an understanding of how aerosolized particles move through a space.