Impact of the Report
The New York Times credits the reports from Imperial College [1] for having a particularly influential impact on policy: The report, which warned that an uncontrolled spread of the disease …
Course: COVID-19: Pandemics, Modelling, and Policy
Critiquing the model
When building models it is essential to be self-critical. The model built in the previous two steps fits the data well but is very poor for a number of reasons. …
Fitting curves to data
Many systems can be usefully modelling by fitting curves to historical data. This well established scientific method can be very useful when used well. Figure 9.3(a) shows the UK deaths …
Simulating Vaccination
This video shows the Agent Based Model run with 50% of the agents vaccinated. Without vaccination the epidemic spreads rapidly as illustrated in Figure 6.1(a) . There is a high …
The Visions of Policymakers
In democracies citizens want their politicians and policy makers to have vision for a better future. Policy makers are expected to foresee problems and opportunities. In this context their policies …
Models, Prediction & Forecasting
A model is a description of a system or process to show how it works. Physical models are used in many ways. Architects use them to enable clients to visualise …
Healthcare Systems in Crisis: The Effect of COVID-19
Pandemics are large-scale widespread cascades of infectious diseases that can cause severe illness and death and require much higher level of healthcare provision than normal. A challenge for governments worldwide …
Time Series Models
The graph above is an example of a time series. It is a series of data points in March 2020 showing the total number of people in the USA infected …
The Shape of Epidemics
The first thing to do when modelling a real world system is to look at it and abstract the most important features. For epidemics the fundamental things is the population. …
“Our policy is driven by science”
Figure 11.1. Timeline to the UK Lockdown Politicians have the problem that, even if they believe in evidence-based policy, the evidence they receive from scientists can be inconsistent or downright …
From Herd Immunity to Flattening the Curve
This is an additional video, hosted on YouTube. In this video Prof Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer of the National Health Service briefly summarises the British Government’s policy to save …
Introduction to Week 2
Resumé of Week 1 Previously we reviewed some of the vital statistics of COVID-19 and the crises in healthcare systems. The Kermac-McKendrick SIR model was presented as the basis for …
Transmission and Policy
Understanding how COVID-19 is transmitted is fundamental to forecasting how the pandemic will develop and spread. The World Health organisation [1] gives the following definitions and information on the transmission …
Meet the Team
This course is part of an international initiative to bring the best that science can offer into policy. These courses will evolve with the new science of complex systems aiming …
Introduction to Week 1
The Black Death took about five years to spread throughout Europe from China. It has taken the Covid-19 epidemic about five months to do the same. This course concerns the …