Preamble

Abstract

In February 2020, Annalisa Manara, a medical doctor and anaesthesiologist at the hospital in Codogno, south of Milan, Italy, had the clever intuition of testing for COVID-19 a patient whose pneumonia symptoms had taken a sudden turn for the worse. The identification of that “patient one” openly revealed that COVID-19 was already spreading in Europe;and very rapidly, the epidemic exploded in the crowded areas nearby Milan (where I live). We went from learning about a new virus following dramatic news from China, to be the first region in the western world to be violently hit by the epidemic. As a human being, and as a statistician, I felt a desperate surge of questions—how could this happen, how could we be ‘surprised’, why did we underestimate the risk so badly? Why didn’t WHO, the World Health Organization, give the alarm promptly, where was the voice of statisticians? © Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2022