Creating a Resurgence Analysis Dashboard during the COVID-19 pandemic
Tue, 13 May
|Online & CPT and Joburg Venues
Facilitating evidence-based decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic by Jared Norman in colloboration with the Cape Town & Joburg R User Groups and the ORSSA SIG in Public Policy. RSVP for details.
Time & Location
13 May 2025, 16:30 – 18:00 SAST
Online & CPT and Joburg Venues
Guests
About the Event
About the talk
Nobody was prepared for COVID-19. In March 2020, a few of us at the Modelling and Simulation Hub, Africa (MASHA) decided to focus all of our efforts into facilitating evidence-based decision-making. A key aspect of this effort was to collaborate with two other institutions and form the South African COVID-19 Modelling Consortium (SACMC) together with SACEMA and HE2RO, and chaired by the NICD.
A mathematical model was built but once we learned that the virus was mutating enough to create variants with different key features and that new variants could arise at any time, we realised that mechanistic modelling techniques would bring with them very large uncertainty. As such, we pivoted after the first wave and decided to focus on resurgence metrics which would be frequently updated. The mechanistic modelling would be included in less-regular reports. This philosophy of using whatever techniques solve the real-world problem being…