Sensitivity, Specificity, and COVID-19 Testing As every doctor should know, medical tests are rarely 100% accurate. Interpreting them is a matter of probability. And probability, of course, is a matter of mathematics… Bill Casselman University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Well, make up your mind. Does he have it orRead More →
Mathematics and the Family Tree of SARS-Cov-2 It’s a remarkable process and, if it weren’t so dangerous to humanity, would be deserving of admiration. … Bill Casselman University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Introduction There are two major ways in which mathematics has contributed to our understanding of the diseaseRead More →
More Measles In this column, I shall say more about modeling the progress of an epidemic. ... Bill Casselman University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Introduction This is the second Feature Column in which I discuss the mathematics involved in the transmission of measles. The first one made a fewRead More →
Bill Casselman’s Column Archive Here are Bill Casselman’s older Feature Columns. Bill’s newest columns may be found here. January 2021 – Am I really uninfected? COVID-19 and rapid testing (Math and the Sciences, Math and Nature, Probability and Statistics) September 2020 – Does He Have It?: Sensitivity, Specificity, and COVID-19Read More →