UW professor: Health data collection needs improvement before next pandemic
Oct 25, 2025, 5:00 AM
A recent study from the University of Washington (UW) and Oxford found school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 will cost the U.S. economy $2 trillion.
The staggering future deficit mainly stems from setbacks in student learning. The study revealed a significant global learning shortfall from the pandemic that needs to be addressed.
Researchers explained a combination of masks, testing, social distancing, and targeted shutdowns could have cut the pandemic’s cost from $4.6 trillion to $1.9 trillion.
KIRO Newsradio spoke with one of the authors of that study, Adrian E. Raftery, a Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Sociology at the UW.
Raftery said that during the pandemic, the data on the number of infections and the systems in place to track it were not good in the United States. He hopes that leaders invest in ways to improve health data collection, so we are ready for the next pandemic.
Watch the full discussion in the video above.
