Ruth Etzioni

I was always curious.  An early elementary school memory is my mother returning from a parent-teacher conference to report that my teacher thought I had “an enquiring mind.” Curiosity is what led me to a life of research, as a biostatistician and population scientist. Because in research, the questions you ask are just as important as their answers. The questions... Read More

For a numbers person like myself, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is supremely frustrating. Even after 8 months, there are so many numbers that we still do not know.  Even though there are thousands of researchers trying to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, the gaps persist. As the officially recorded US death toll from SARS-CoV2 approached 200,000 last month (it’s... Read More

In the last few days I have been wondering how Michael Joyner and Arturo Casadevall have been feeling. Joyner and Casadevall are the first and senior authors, respectively, of the report, “Effect of Convalescent Plasma on Mortality among Hospitalized Patients with COVID-19: Initial Three Month Experience,” posted on Medrxiv on August 12. The preprint server allows researchers to make their... Read More

Long ago, in the early days of the pandemic, models were everywhere in the news. As our lives were upended and everything became uncertain, models were there to provide some predictability in the face of the unknown. Never mind that predictions varied wildly – between models, and even within the same model at different time points. The models agreed that... Read More