The Basics of Epidemiology
I’ve always believed that information is critical to keep us safe, calm, and healthy. As policymakers, the media, and our friends provide us with new data about COVID-19 each day, this series of 10-15 minute videos provides some of the basic concepts of epidemiology to help make you an informed consumer of information. I hope they are helpful - please contact me (link on my homepage) with any comments or suggestions.
Session 1
How disease spreads
This session provides an overview of how epidemiologists think about the spread of disease, and how our conceptual frameworks help identify opportunities to intervene.
Session 2
Quantifying disease spread
This session provides describes how epidemiologists measure the spread of disease, focusing on measuring prevalence and incidence.
Session 3
Measuring disease severity
This session focuses on measuring mortality (death) associated with disease and why estimating case-fatality in the midst of an epidemic like COVID-19 is challenging.
Session 4
Herd Immunity
This session focuses on herd immunity - how achieving specific thresholds of population immunity keeps the public healthy.
Session 5
Disease Surveillance
This session describes how the U.S. conducts disease surveillance and the system upon which COVID-19 surveillance is dependent.
April 12 update: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a new website on COVID-19 surveillance.
Session 6
Outbreak Investigations
This session walks through the CDC’s 13 steps for conducting disease outbreak investigations.
Session 7
Risk
This session explores the concept of risk and how we use risk to quantify the association between an exposure and a disease.
Session 8
Cohort Studies
This session describes cohort studies, which enable us to estimate risk between exposures and disease outcomes.
Session 9
Case-Control Studies
Graduation! This session describes how to conduct case-control studies, in which we estimate exposures among those with disease.