Outbreak Investigation
Project pitch
Having good data is essential when developing mathematical models; however, it is often hard to come by. Modelers must often rely on data, collected by others, that were obtained via epidemiological studies (e.g. outbreak investigations). Outbreak investigations are often conducted to provide researchers with information on both the natural history of the disease (e.g. prognosis, duration of symptoms, etc.) and on risk factors associated with developing the disease. This group will be resident “epidemiologists on call” and must be willing to: respond to any outbreaks that occur while the clinic is in session, obtain relevant data, and conduct appropriate analyses to describe the details of the outbreak and identify possible risk factors. No prior knowledge of epidemiology or outbreak investigations is necessary.
Things to consider
This project uses data from a real-time, stochastic simulation of an outbreak in a small, known, population. For this reason, the data are very much like real data in some ways (there is substantial noise and transmission occurs through a real contact network) but very unlike real data in other ways (we have near-perfect information about the underlying dynamic process, such as who infected whom when, how many potentially infectious contacts each case had, each case’s effective reproduction number, when each case “recovered,” etc.).
Research area(s)
- Infectious disease dynamics
- Transmission modelling
- Stochastic processes
Data
Type of data
Detailed line-list data
Description and status of data
Will be readily available and clean to be able to implement the project without too much delay
Software
Participants will R software (packages will depend on the participants choice).
Potential research question(s)
- How fast did then epidemic spread?
- Can a simple model, fitted to the data, reproduce the outbreak and predict its course?
Resources
- Reingold (1998): Background information on outbreak investigations.