A pandemic poses particular challenges to decision-making because of the need to continuously adapt decisions to rapidly changing evidence and available data. For example, which countermeasures are appropriate at a particular stage of the pandemic? How can the severity of the pandemic be...

Modern sampling designs in survey statistics, in general, are constructed in order to optimize the accuracy of estimators such as totals, means and proportions. In stratified random sampling a variance minimal solution was introduced by Neyman and Tschuprov. However, practical constraints may...