Fighting a pandemic is a joint effort; we cannot do it alone. Only if the majority of the community adheres to preventive behaviors, e.g., hand washing, social distancing, self-quarantining, can each individual person be safe. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic shows characteristics of a social dilemma known as a public bad. Back in May, when we […]
Six months into the COVID-19 crisis, we bite our regularly washed fingernails waiting for a vaccine, but for now, behavioural interventions are the only medicine. How do we find out which interventions work? To answer this question, we decided to measure their efficacy through experiments. One Art Fair and around 200,000 data points later, we […]
This blog post was originally published on https://fabiandablander.com/r/Corona-Party.html. There is no doubt that, every now and then, one ought to celebrate life. This usually involves people coming together, talking, laughing, dancing, singing, shouting; simply put, it means throwing a party. With temperatures rising, summer offers all the more incentive to organize such a joyous event. [&helli...
Prediction is hard, especially about the future. While mathematical models by no means guarantee accurate predictions, they at least formalize the process through which one arrives at them. This allows one to criticise their assumptions and, in the event of eventual failure, pinpoint where and why they went wrong. With respect to COVID-19, van Wees […]
In my last blogpost, I discussed the importance of as well as the rocky road leading towards Open Science during the corona crisis. To the disappointment of many scientists, almost no data about the corona crisis was publicly available at the time. However, a lot has changed since my last blog post; the rocks on […]
Many aspects of life require that humans are in physical contact with other humans. We can think of people as nodes in a network and contact between them as defining the edges of the network. Unsurprisingly, this contact network plays a key role in virus transmission. This suggests that we can use insights from network […]
The novel coronavirus has a firm grip on nearly all countries across the world, and there is large heterogeneity in how countries have responded to the threat. Some countries, such as Brazil and the United States, have fared exceptionally poorly. Other countries, such as South Korea and Germany, have done exceptionally well. Many countries have […]
In April, the Dutch government announced its intention to develop a corona-app that could be used in contact tracing. Other countries like China (Vervaeke, 2020), Australia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Norway are already implementing or piloting such an app (Servick, 2020). However, concerns over the privacy of the app may be as widespread as […]
The COVID-19 pandemic will end only when a sufficient number of people have become immune, thus preventing future outbreaks. Principally, so-called exit strategies differ on whether immunity is achieved through natural infections, or whether it is achieved through a vaccine. Countries across the world are scrambling to find an adequate exit strategy, with differential success. To mo...
Open Science is a movement which aims to make scientific research transparent and accessible to all levels of society (Woelfle, Olliaro & Todd, 2011). Open Science has different goals, such as making science more verifiable and results reproducible, thus more reliable. There is also a political and moral argument for Open Science: a lot of […]
