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Forum: What will happen to data analysts after COVID-19 pandemic

Hi

I was thinking nowadays when a big deal of wet lab works has stopped and for the time being most of reasearch community focused on analysis of the available data and publishing what they already have in their hand on their own ongoing research, after this pandemic wet labs will flourish again so data analysis may down for some time especially by decreasing the research budgets from government to hire data analysts while most of data has been already analyzed from home in lockdown period what do you thing

Sorry for my English

covid

5 answers

I know for a fact that 100% of wet-lab research has not stopped. Not even close to it.

I don't think there will be an expectation for all of us to study SARS viruses even after this is done - there are only so many ways to study 15 or so genes, and plenty of people are doing it already. I think data analysts should have plenty to do, or at least as much as they did before this ordeal.

I don't think we'll run out of data soon

Wet lab work will continue where supply chains can allow it to continue, and local regulations can permit researchers to come in to run the equipment and maintain samples. But there is and has always been more data to analyze than wet lab folks can create.

In my group everyone is working in the lab, the experiments are still on going. We are not a huge group though, and all the high-throughput in our lab is performed by external facilities. For the time being, the waiting time is pretty high for lib prep and sequencing in this kind of centers. This might be the bottleneck for the next months.

People will carry on processing the backlog of data and unwritten papers for months if not years to come. There will be no shortage of legacy data, nor new data being generated I am certain.

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