Pandemics and methodological developments in epidemiology history.

ABSTRACT

The crisis spurred by the pandemic of COVID-19 has revealed weaknesses in our epidemiologic methodologic corpus, which scientists are struggling to compensate. This article explores whether this phenomenon is characteristic of pandemics or not. Since the emergence of population-based sciences in the 17th century, we can observe close temporal correlations between the plague and the discovery of population thinking, cholera and population-based group comparisons, tuberculosis and the formalization of cohort studies, the 1918 Great Influenza and the creation of an academic epidemiologic counterpart to the public health service, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the formalization of causal inference concepts. The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have promoted the widespread understanding of population thinking both with respect to ways of flattening an epidemic curve and the societal bases of health inequities. If the latter proves true, it will support my hypothesis that pandemics did accelerate profound changes in epidemiologic methods and concepts.