#151: Steve’s worldview, biases & approach to COVID-19 research

This is a shorter solo podcast, for those interested to know more about the producer of all of AdapNation’s COVID-19 and associated content, and how it’s done. 

This episode is part confessional, part insight into how I work, and part instructional.  

It’s great to see our content is helpful and valuable to so many in calibrating their knowledge and perspectives regarding COVID-19, human health and government public health interventions. More and more people are gaining the courage and confidence to share our evidence-based content, set up their own pages and even produce their own analysis. Amazing! 

But, let’s be clear, we ALL have our biases. You can’t be human and not have your own worldview and biases, that inevitably act as both a map and a lens in which you evaluate and respond to reality. I (Steve) am no exception. 

So, in an effort to be an open book to our supporters, new followers, and even sceptics of our work, I thought it would be only right to share my health-oriented worldview and known biases. Yep, it’s a laundry list! No doubt you would have experienced my biases in my work, so this is merely a confession to the fact I know that they exist and I try my best to mitigate them. 

No one is immune to cognitive dissonance, me being no exception. The more open we can be about this, the better we can explore truth versus attempting to bend reality to match our expectations and beliefs of the world. 

This episode will also let you in to how I further develop my my subject matter knowledge, how I research and investigate issues, how I prevent being in an echo chamber, my approach to content creation, the important aspects of statistician analysis and visualisation, and the common COVID-associated data sources AdapNation frequently use in our work.  

The #BeYourBest Journey : https://adapnation.io/beyourbest-journey/

Referenced AdapNation Resources:

• COVID+ Insights – the AdapNation in-context COVID dashboard
• COVID Content – a collection of our best COVID content
• AdapNation on Facebook – joint the community which reaches 1.5M+ people a month
• About Steve Katasi

COVID-19 Official Data Sources we use:

• DHSC COVID-19 Dashboard
• ONS Weekly deaths reporting
• FHM Daily reporting – Sweden
• ScB Deaths Data for Swedish deaths insights
• NHS daily, weekly and monthly Hospital-related reporting
• OurWorldInData has useful visualisation globally, plus a full data download
• Worldometer is similar, but better for leaderboards and a more simplistic visualisation of Cases and Deaths