Dangerous Data Scientists

Written by @prashantmdgl9 who is not an epidemiologist.

We are living amidst a pandemic.

It’s common knowledge and not an astute observation that every other article in the newspaper or websites is about COVID-19; there are loads of messages circulated every day on social media on how to prevent the crisis, conspiracy theories, people claiming to have found the cure, and meticulously orchestrated attempts to link the virus with every other thing in the universe.

One such cohort of articles that suddenly proliferated and conspicuously stands out belong to data science. These are easy to spot as they are embellished with multifarious graphs, visualisations that are based on mined datasets and eventually they make a blanket conclusions such as it is just another flu, no need of mass hysteria or worst is yet to come.

A woman sitting next to me in the flight last month exclaimed with authority that the curve needs to be flattened and before I could reply she said, Ro needs to be controlled. My first thought was “Thanks Contagion”! The infodemic has suddenly propelled an acute interest in analysing data and given birth to millions of epidemiologists all over the globe.

Oh, a correction! — Armchair epidemiologists.

Anyone who knows how to code, PhD holders, entry-level data scientists, software engineers are analyzing public datasets, plotting graphs, and making sweeping declarations about the pandemic and the state of the world in coming future…