In mid-August, about exactly 10 weeks ago, the wave of return travel was in full swing. Weekly testing numbers had almost tripled compared to early summer. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) registered an average of about 1,200 new Corona cases daily—and a newspaper with four letters asked me: Where will we end up in autumn if this continues? Back then, I calculated a number of up to 20,000 positive tests per day by the end of October. It was a huge headline that brought me angr

"Strong society, strong economy, strong self" refers to a comprehensive approach to resilience and empowerment at individual, economic, and societal levels. The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted several vulnerabilities, prompting questions about how a country can be more resilient. One foundational element for building a more resilient nation, as identified in your text, is Data Literacy: the competency to make better decisions with the aid of data. Data in Crisis The critical

Next week, COVID-19 vaccinations are set to begin in the UK after the BioNTech vaccine was approved there. EU approval is also not far off. There is great euphoria, and at the same time, it is clear: not everyone can be vaccinated at once. Very likely, not everyone wants to be vaccinated either. Acceptance and Voluntariness Require Credibility and Trust On November 9, a joint working group consisting of members from the Standing Committee on Vaccination, the German Ethics Cou

Our Unstatistic of the Month for November addressed the question of how to correctly interpret statements about vaccine effectiveness. That contribution continues to make big waves to this day. Immediately after its publication, BR Faktenfuchs very differentiatedly addressed the topic of absolute and relative risk reduction, clarifying why the statement that the active ingredient protects 95% of vaccinated individuals from getting sick or even infected is not correct. However

‘Only with scientific evaluations that are independent and based on a very broad foundation can the necessary decision-making aids be made available to policymakers in the shortest possible time,’ said DAGStat Chairman Prof Dr Friede in connection with a current recommendation for a national strategy for the collection and processing of data. ‘Full transparency in data collection, full transparency in the models used and the analysis of the data sets as well as full transpare

‘Coronavirus case numbers are meaningless. Unless you know something about testing. And even then, it gets complicated.’ So wrote Nate Silver, statistician and founder of FiveThirtyEight, almost exactly a year ago. But do we know enough about testing? Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless* *Unless you know something about testing. And even then, it gets complicated. In October, we explained in the Unstatistic of the Month why the 7-day incidence, which shows the developmen