Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Michelle Kendall

Adam Kucharski @adamjkucharski.bsky.social · 23h

Want to build an interactive dashboard so others can explore epidemic scenarios? For COVID, @ngdavies.bsky.social spearheaded a great drag-and-drop approach, which made use of the JavaScript-based nature of RShiny... 1/

2 10 29

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Sep 1

I’m delighted to share that I’ve just started work on this @cepi.net project in Christophe Fraser’s group @christophraser.bsky.social

cepi.net//landmark-af...

Landmark African-led research to map the extent of Rift Valley fever impact | CEPI

The studies will help scientists figure out if trials assessing the efficacy of Rift Valley fever vaccines are possible.

cepi.net

1 10

Reposted by Michelle Kendall

Christophe Fraser's Group @christophraser.bsky.social · Aug 26

New paper: we argue that a promising approach for studying mpox vaccine effectiveness in Central Africa to incorporate mpox vaccination + testing data into existing cohort studies, especially those for HIV/STIs.
www.thelancet.com/journals/ebi...

Clade I mpox vaccination: strategies for deployment and evaluation

Clade I mpox continues to spread in Central Africa with no sign of abating,1 however very few doses of vaccine have been deployed. Mpox vaccination strategies using either of the licenced vaccines, MV...

www.thelancet.com

1 6 4

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Jun 25

"I have long felt that the risks of sharing your data - the possibility that your information will fall into the hands of people who are up to no good - are given far more prominence that the potential rewards in the form of advances in medicine."

Rory Cellan-Jones @rorycj.bsky.social · Jun 25

open.substack.com/pub/rorycell... Health data - time to tell an upbeat story. I told the National Patient Data Day conference it was high time the Research community was a bit bolder in explaining the importance of sharing health data

Health Data - Time to Tell an Upbeat Story

The problem, I told the National Patient Data Day event in Leeds yesterday, could be summed up in one Guardian headline:

open.substack.com

1

Reposted by Michelle Kendall

Rory Cellan-Jones @rorycj.bsky.social · May 15

open.substack.com/pub/rorycell... This post about the importance of knowing the difference between truth tellers and myth makers in healthcare has already attracted a comment from a member of the “plandemic” community which nicely makes my point about the dangers of disinformation

The Truth About the Covid App

Myths about its cost and effectiveness stop us learning lessons

open.substack.com

5 16 120

Reposted by Michelle Kendall

Sonja Lehtinen @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social · Apr 7

New paper: long-term trends in antibiotic resistance show signs of stabilisation (thread). journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

The evolution of antibiotic resistance in Europe, 1998–2019

Author summary Antibiotic resistance is an important public health threat: resistant infections are currently associated with 5 million deaths per year globally. This burden may increase further in th...

journals.plos.org

6 44 70

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Feb 27

Right? Maybe there are good reasons for the scheduling, and only a small minority of us working part/flexi hours and not using after school clubs. But if we had been considered even for a moment I would expect them to at least offer a recording, and I can’t see one mentioned…

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Feb 27

🪧 What do we want? 🪧
Help balancing work and family life!

🪧 When do we want it? 🪧
School pick-up time!

Screenshot of details for a Royal Statistical Society event, titled "Balancing the Equation: Work, Family, and Career Growth in Statistics and Data Science". It is scheduled for Monday 3 March from 3 to 4pm.

1 2 10

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Jan 21

@psioxford.bsky.social are hosting the International Pandemic Sciences Conference on 30 June – 1 July 2025 in Oxford and online, theme

'Getting ahead of the curve' 📈

Visit the website now to:
➡️ Register to attend
➡️ Submit an abstract
www.psi.ox.ac.uk/conference25

#episky #IDsky

3 3

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Dec 19

Interesting thread about calculating the reproduction number and reflecting on its utility

Sam Abbott @seabbs.bsky.social · Dec 13

In 2022 @sbfnk.bsky.social and I wrote this blog on what it was like estimating the effective reproduction number daily for 2 years and if it was helpful

epiforecasts.io/posts/2022-0...

Reflections on two years estimating effective reproduction numbers – EpiForecasts

Over the last two years we have estimated reproduction numbers daily for several thousand locations, presented these estimates as a curated data set and visualised them at epiforecasts.io/covid. In th...

epiforecasts.io

1 1 3

Reposted by Michelle Kendall

Christophe Fraser's Group @christophraser.bsky.social · Dec 16

Hinch & Panovska‑Griffiths et al, Nature Sci Rep: we quantified how variable mpox case ascertainment delays over time in the UK distorted the relationship between growing case counts and the true epidemic growth
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Quantification of the time-varying epidemic growth rate and of the delays between symptom onset and presenting to healthcare for the mpox epidemic in the UK in 2022 - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Quantification of the time-varying epidemic growth rate and of the delays between symptom onset and presenting to healthcare for the mpox epidemic in the UK in 2022

www.nature.com

1 1 1

Reposted by Michelle Kendall

Christophe Fraser's Group @christophraser.bsky.social · Dec 16

Kendall & Ferretti et al, Science: we showed anonymised data from app-based contact tracing enables analytics for epidemic monitoring that is virtually real-time, high-resolution & national scale. Nice Science mag front cover 👀 (Remember outdoors safer than indoors!)
045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/monitoring

Front cover of Science Magazine shows a large crowd of people watching a football match, with the title TRANSMISSION EVENT: Digital contact tracing for COVID-19

Example of app-based epidemic monitoring in England during the Euro 2020 football tournament. A graph shows how the daily number of close contact events and transmission events detected by the NHS COVID-19 app in England had sharp and increasing peaks on days of England football matches.

2 1 3

Reposted by Michelle Kendall

Christophe Fraser's Group @christophraser.bsky.social · Dec 16

👋 Hello World! Some of our papers this year ICYMI
Ferretti & Wymant et al, Nature: using 7 million digitally recorded COVID exposures, we found app-based contact tracing successfully measured the actual risk of transmission and we decomposed contributors to risk 045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/risk_measure...

Image shows how the probability of reported infection with SARS-CoV-2 among people notified by the NHS COVID-19 App increases with the risk score calculated by the app.

1 5 10

Reposted by Michelle Kendall

Moritz Kraemer @mugkraemer.bsky.social · Nov 18

Another opportunity to come work @universityofoxford.bsky.social on the @oxmartinschool.bsky.social project on *Digital Pandemic Preparedness* together with Profs. Christl Donnelly, Christophe Fraser, Melinda Mills, Michael Parker, Luca Ferretti and me.

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Digital Pandemic Preparedness

This programme will develop a blueprint for digital health systems that can be deployed during pandemics, create a funding model for implementation, and…

www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk

12 14

Reposted by Michelle Kendall

Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · Nov 18

New article by me & Lucas at Our World in Data!

The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have killed more than 25 million people; it caused grief & suffering among their loved ones, impacted people's health worldwide & disrupted work & lifestyles.

We look back on the pandemic with 17 charts:

17 key charts to understand the COVID-19 pandemic

The pandemic has resulted in over twenty million deaths. In this article, we review the key insights from global data on COVID-19.

ourworldindata.org

22 96 230

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 12

Really handy! Thanks!

Theo Sanderson @theo.io · Nov 12

I had a try at making this
bsky-follow-finder.theo.io

Enter your handle and it will find people followed by lots of the people you follow (but not you)

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 11

Shout out to everyone who worked on the NHS COVID-19 app, particularly my amazing academic collaborators Christophe Fraser, @chriswymant.bsky.social, Luca Ferretti, @daphnetsallis.bsky.social, @alicele.bsky.social and Xavier Didelot who all played a central role in the work I've described.

3

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 11

2. Motivations for pandemic preparedness. Digital contact tracing apps could:
a. play a key, low-cost role in mitigating future outbreaks.
b. gather valuable insights in real time, helping to evaluate and fine-tune our choices of public health interventions (towards minimising negative impacts).

1 1 2

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 11

To round up. Why is all this important?
1. Retrospective insights:
a. we've quantified the epidemiological effectiveness of digital contact tracing.
b. we've found out more about COVID-19: how and when it spread during the years the app was active, in lots of detail.

1 1 3

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 11

Further results and more details are of course available at the links provided, with discussion of subtleties, limitations etc. to unpack this big list of statements.

For easy-read versions with just a bit more detail, you may prefer the corresponding blog posts: michellekendall.github.io/blog/

1 1

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 11

Christmas and the Euros were associated with big increases in spread, driven by synchronised (likely inter-generational) meet-ups across England and/or Wales. Excess transmissions on Euro match days accounted for 29% of all app-recorded transmissions during the month-long tournament scim.ag/86t

Science magazine cover showing England football fans in Wembley stadium, titled "Transmission Event: Digital contact tracing for COVID-19"

Figure showing contacts and transmissions associated with England match days during the Euros

1 2

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 11

Plus the data captured fine-grained insights into the drivers of transmission, including the effects of day-of-the-week, setting (longer vs more fleeting contact), and geographical region.

$Figure showing relative daily fractions of contacts which were from households, recurring, single day or fleeting encounters, and the corresponding proportions of transmissions. Christmas Day stands out as having many more household contacts and fewer fleeting contacts than usual.$

1 2

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 11

Analysis of app data provided a leading indicator of the reproduction number R, available at least 5 days earlier than other estimates. This provided valuable situational awareness for policy makers.

Figure showing various estimators of the reproduction number R over the course of the epidemic

1 1 2

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 11

Finally, app data provided near real-time insights into the drivers of the epidemic. We could see if a wave was driven by an increase in contact rates or infectiousness.
doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Figure showing the contributions of (a) contact rates and (b) probability of reported infection to (c) the reproduction number.

1 1 2

Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · Nov 11

"Whereas most exposures were short (median 0.7 h, interquartile range 0.4–1.6), transmissions typically resulted from exposures lasting between 1 h and several days (median 6 h, interquartile range 1.4–28). Households accounted for about 6% of contacts but 40% of transmissions."

Figure showing how short, intermediate and long exposures all contribute to COVID transmission

1 1