Want to know how many people have the coronavirus? Test randomly

In an article published by The Conversation Daniel N. Rockmore and Michael Herron, both professors at Dartmouth, describe how random testing can help us understand the spread of the coronavirus in the US.

Currently, testing is heavily skewed towards those with symptoms. While this makes sense, considering limited testing resources, it prevents us from fully understanding how the impact of COVID-19 varies between regions and communities.

Dan and Michael argue that even a small set of randomly distributed tests, as few as 10,000, would give health officials an accurate picture of the current spread of the virus throughout the US.

Random sampling is used as a fundamental building block in many areas of science, from social sciences to physics and even computer graphics!

Read the full article at The Conversation!