All I said is that they have health benefits. But I completely agree that there other routes to achieving these (education on safe knife use / assembly from reusable components that could be used for other things) which are preferable. doi.org/10.1016/j.aj...

I was speaking about the epinowcast package, ecosystem, and community with a little bit of a pitch for modelling in Julia at the end.

If any of this work takes your interest this PhD on delay estimation may interest you.

bsky.app/profile/iddj...

To apply go to www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/fees-a... and in the meantime get in touch with any questions.

If generally interested in a PhD in this area have a look at all projects - they're great selection of topics to be taken on by a cohort of students interested in improving pandemic preparedness. The full list is at www.lshtm.ac.uk/media/87071

These are all in collaboration with Imperial @anne-cori.bsky.social and UKHSA so give lots of opportunities for collaboration and applications to case studies of immediate public health relevance.

The final project is to improve real-time estimation of reproduction numbers through better understanding of transmission processes and the drivers that shape them. These estimates can directly inform required control efforts but also be used to monitor changes in transmission.

Another project aims to improve real-time forecasts of infectious disease outbreaks, involving ensemble methods and a variety of models and testing different data sets that can inform them. Crucially, we need to validate predictions to improve them so evaluation is a big part of this project.

On project is to improve our ability to characterise things like reporting delays, incubation periods, generation times etc. in real time, i.e. during ongoing outbreaks. These can inform control options such as contact tracing but this requires fully understanding the variation in observed delays.