Infectious Respiratory Disease

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 25.05.07

  1. Unit Guide
  1. Introduction and Rationale
  2. Demographics
  3. Content
  4. Teaching Strategies
  5. Classroom Activities
  6. Annotated Bibliography
  7. Appendix on Implementing District Standards
  8. NOTES:

From Crisis to Curiosity: Using Pandemic Data to Ignite Math Thinking

Jennifer Leigh Neff

Published September 2025

Tools for this Unit:

NOTES:

1 Alaska Department of Education & Early Development. Alaska Mathematics Standards, 115

2 Pitlik, Silvio Daniel. "COVID-19 Compared to Other Pandemic Diseases," in Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, 3

3 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Influenza (Flu) Viruses," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last reviewed September 26, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses-types.html.

4 Philip A. Mackowiak, "Prior Pandemics: Looking to the Past for Insight into the COVID-19 Pandemic," Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives 11, no. 2 (2021): 167-9, https://doi.org/10.1080/20009666.2020.1855706.

5 P. T. King and S. L. Londrigan, "The 1918 Influenza and COVID-19 Pandemics: The Effect of Age on Outcomes," Respirology 26 (2021): 840, https://doi.org/10.1111/resp.14109.

6 Mackowiak, "Prior Pandemics," 168.

7 Mackowiak, "Prior Pandemics," 168.

8 King and Londrigan, “The 1918 Influenza and COVID-19 Pandemics,” 840.

9 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Reconstruction of the 1918 Influenza Virus," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (archived October 10, 2018), https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html.

10 Mackowiak, "Prior Pandemics," 168.

11 King and Londrigan, “The 1918 Influnza and COVID-19 Pandemics,” 840.

12 Pitlik, "COVID-19 Compared to Other Pandemic Diseases," 2–3.

13 World Health Organization, "COVID-19 Deaths," WHO COVID-19 Dashboard, last updated June 21, 2025, https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths.

14 COVID-19 Forecasting Team, "Variation in the COVID-19 Infection-Fatality Ratio by Age, Time, and Geography during the Pre-Vaccine Era: A Systematic Analysis," The Lancet 399 (April 16, 2022): 1473, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02867-1.

15 Jennifer Summers et al., "Comparing Two Pandemics: A Century Apart," Public Health Communication Centre, March 15, 2024, https://www.phcc.org.nz/briefing/comparing-two-pandemics-century-apart.

16 King and Londrigan, “The 1918 Influnza and COVID-19 Pandemics,” 841.

17 Mackowiak, "Prior Pandemics," 168.

18 Gapminder, "Life Expectancy from Birth, by Country, during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (Spanish Flu), from 1917 to 2020," chart, March 9, 2020, in Statista, accessed June 18, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102387/life-expectancy-by-country-during-spanish-flu/.

19 St. Louis Fed. "Influenza mortality rates during the Spanish Flu pandemic in select US states from 1915 to 1919 (per 100,000 people)." Chart. December 31, 2007. Statista. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103622/mortality-rate-per-us-state-spanish-flu/

20 Murray et al., "Estimation of Potential Global Pandemic Influenza Mortality," 2213.

21 NCHS and CDC, "Number of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Deaths in the U.S. as of June 14, 2023, by Age*," chart, June 14, 2023, Statista, accessed July 22, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/.

22 M. Lang, spanishflu: Spanish Flu Datasets (U.S.) (Version 0.1.0), GitHub repository, 2024, https://github.com/markushlang/spanishflu, dataset deaths_by_sex_age.

23 Alfred W. Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

24 Peter Liljedahl, Tracy Zager, and Laura Wheeler (Illustrator), Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning (Corwin Mathematics, 2021).

25 Margaret S. Smith and Mary Kay Stein, 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions (Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2011).

26 Illustrative Mathematics, "Instructional Routines," Illustrative Mathematics, 2019, https://curriculum.illustrativemathematics.org/MS/teachers/2/instructional_routines.html.

27 Illustrative Mathematics, "Instructional Routines," Illustrative Mathematics, 2019, https://curriculum.illustrativemathematics.org/MS/teachers/2/instructional_routines.html.

28 Illustrative Mathematics, "Instructional Routines," Illustrative Mathematics, 2019, https://curriculum.illustrativemathematics.org/MS/teachers/2/instructional_routines.html.

29 Dattani et al., "Life expectancy."

30 Alaska Department of Education & Early Development. Alaska Mathematics Standards, 115

31 Murray, Christopher J. L., Alan D. Lopez, Brian Chin, Dennis Feehan, and Kenneth H. Hill. "Estimation of Potential Global Pandemic Influenza Mortality on the Basis of Vital Registry Data from the 1918–20 Pandemic: A Quantitative Analysis." The Lancet 368 (December 23/30, 2006): 2211–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69894-3.

32 Kaiser Family Foundation, und Peterson Center on Healthcare. "COVID-19 pandemic-related excess mortality rate in the U.S. and select countries worldwide in 2020, by age group (per 100,000 people in age group)." Chart. April 7, 2021. Statista. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1259019/covid-related-excess-mortality-rate-in-the-us-and-select-countries-by-age/

33 Samrat K. Dey et al., "Analyzing the Epidemiological Outbreak of COVID-19: A Visual Exploratory Data Analysis Approach," Journal of Medical Virology 92 (2020): 635, https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.25743.

34 Hoseinpour Dehkordi, Amirhoshang, Majid Alizadeh, Pegah Derakhshan, Peyman Babazadeh, and Arash Jahandideh. "Understanding epidemic data and statistics: A case study of COVID-19." Journal of Medical Virology 92 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.25885.

35 Peccia, Jordan and Zhang, Zoe, Personal Communication. "Wastewater SARS-COV2 Concentrations New Haven, CT." Last modified April 10, 2024. Yale University.

36 Saloni Dattani et al., "Life Expectancy at Birth," Our World in Data, last updated December 3, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?country=FIN~NOR~ESP~SWE~CHE~USA&v=1&csvType=filtered&useColumnShortNames=false (archived June 24, 2025, at https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250624-125417/grapher/life-expectancy.html).

37 Statista, "Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths Worldwide per One Million Population as of July 13, 2022, by Country," chart, July 13, 2022, accessed July 13, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/.

38 Kaiser Family Foundation and Peterson Center on Healthcare, "COVID-19 Pandemic-Related Excess Mortality Rate in the U.S. in 2020, by Age Group and Ethnicity (per 100,000 People in Age Group)," chart, April 7, 2021, in Statista, accessed July 13, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1259041/covid-related-excess-mortality-rate-in-the-us-by-age-and-ethnicity/.

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