IMAGE: Jessica Hallman
Silverman, who joined the College of Information Sciences and Technology last year as an assistant professor with a focus in biomedical statistics, made global headlines last summer for his study suggesting that 80% of U.S. COVID-19 cases went undetected in March 2020.
He and his research team analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the number of patients who sought medical care for influenza-like illnesses during that time span. That number, said Silverman, was far in excess over what was reported in previous years. By applying probabilistic models that Silverman had developed for the analysis of nonlinear time-series data, they found evidence that this excess influenza-like illness was actually caused by the novel coronavirus — largely going undiagnosed due to limited testing capacity at the start of the pandemic.