The pandemic has created a tragic ‘natural experiment’ – a once-in-a-century jolt that could produce unexpected insights
- Adam Kucharski is an associate professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
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Think back on some of the things you learned about Covid-19 in 2020: information such as “fatality risk” and “incubation period”; the potential for “super-spreading events” , and the fact that transmission can happen before symptoms appear. There were the suggestions in mid-January that the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan was much larger than initial reports suggested, and we learned how Wuhan’s subsequent lockdown led to a reduction in transmission. What links these early insights? All of them involved epidemic modelling, which would become a prominent part of the Covid-19 response.
In essence, a model is a structured way of thinking about the dynamics of an epidemic. It allows us to take the knowledge we have, make some plausible assumptions based on that knowledge, then look at the logical implications of those assumptions. We can then compare our results with available datasets, to understand what might be driving the patterns we see. Models can help us make sense of patchy early data and explore possible outcomes – such as future epidemic waves – that haven’t happened yet.
