On the Need to Revitalize Descriptive Epidemiology

Nearly every introductory epidemiology course begins with a focus on person, place, and time, the key components of descriptive epidemiology. And yet in our experience, introductory epidemiology courses were the last time we spent any significant amount of training time focused on descriptive epidemiology. This gave us the impression that descriptive epidemiology does not suffer from bias and is less impactful than causal epidemiology. Descriptive epidemiology may also suffer from a lack of prestige in academia and may be more difficult to fund. We believe this does a disservice to the field and slows progress towards goals of improving population health and ensuring equity in health. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak and subsequent coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic have highlighted the importance of descriptive epidemiology in responding to serious public health crises. In this commentary, we make the case for renewed focus on the importance of descriptive epidemiology in the epidemiology curriculum using SARS-CoV-2 as a motivating example. The framework for error we use in etiological research can be applied in descriptive research to focus on both systematic and random error. We use the current pandemic to illustrate differences between causal and descriptive epidemiology and areas where descriptive epidemiology can have an important impact.