Boosting Students’ Shared Knowledge on Basics of Statistics and Probabilities for Understanding Critical Facts About COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us many lessons. One of them is that we need better tools for understanding the media and politicians. And we need tools for identifying wrong reasoning and wrong assertions on topics as urgent as tests, vaccines, and the associated risk reductions. We describe how we introduced instruments for better decision making on health issues, enhancing the traditional curriculum requirements of a standard course on stochastics for future teachers. This was just a pilot study. The first results are encouraging.