Take this FREE Online Course to Learn About the COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus Disease) Epidemic from Public Health Experts at Imperial College London
At the end of January, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of COVID-19, the former novel coronavirus or ‘2019-nCoV’), a public health emergency of international concern. The media focuses on headlines about government enforced quarantine measures in China’s Hubei province, stranded cruise ships, and Italian villages. Disinformation can cause a sense of fear and panic. That why doctors and public health experts at Imperial College London are offering a totally free online course called Science Matters: Let’s Talk About COVID-19. You will hear COVID-19 updates directly from the experts conducting the analyses, not media headlines.
You’ll start off with a situation report of the COVID-19 epidemic, and when you sign up for this free online course, you will receive a weekly COVID-19 epidemic update from Professor Neil Ferguson. When you sign up for the course, you’ll also learn where to look for find the latest information on COVID-19, not just what makes for shocking news stories. Getting information from reliable sources is important. Reporters and news outlets tend to convey information that get viewers and not necessarily focus on the entire story. Worse yet hackers are taking advantage of COVID-19 fears and launched Coronavirus themed malware campaigns attempting to spread EMOTET malware to unsuspecting people looking to keep abreast of the epidemic. A separate email phishing campaign is also capitalizing on COVID-19 and try to steal banking credentials.
COVID-19 now totals more than 70,000+ cases and 2,600+ deaths. Learn about the learn about evidence-based analysis epidemiological and public health principles that are used to estimate how COVID-19 and other outbreaks will spread, how transmissibility of an infection is estimated, and how the likely fatality rate is determined. You can learn about diseases modelling. Science Matters: Let’s Talk About COVID-19 is estimated to take about 19 hours to complete. It is taught by three public health experts at Imperial College London.
You Will Learn
- An awareness of the scale of the COVID-19 outbreak
- How to track virus trends using reliable sources of information
- To recognize the key scientific underpinnings of outbreak control methods
- To recognize the importance of global cooperation in outbreak response to COVID-19
- How infectious disease modelling informs strategic and operational response at the local, national, and international levels
You’ll start the course off with a situational report and get a weekly update of the status of the epidemic, the latest data from real public health scientists not news reporters.
Over 2,000 people have already enrolled. Click here to get started
Science Matters: Let’s Talk About COVID-19 Syllabus:
- Introduction to Science Matters: Let’s talk COVID-19
- Overview of the Epidemic and the Basic Reproduction Number (R0
- The Case Fatality Rate: Why it Varies, and Why that Matters
- Phylogenetic analysis: how tracking viral genes informs our response
- The Economics of Outbreaks
- Development of a Vaccine in Real-Time Epidemics
- The Clinical Presentations of COVID-19
- Community Participation and the Role of Social Media
In case you want to dig deeper into data analysis, try these courses:
