Eavesdrop On Experts

“Our profession began with infectious diseases,” says Professor Tony Blakely. “So, if I break it down and say epidemic and -ology, which equals study, we are the study of epidemics – epidemiology,” he says. “My day job is to model the effect of interventions on the population’s health. “Sometimes I look in the rear vision mirror of the car and sometimes I look out the front window and I actually forecast the future, under business as usual. Then I layer an intervention over that, like a tax on sugary drinks or a colorectal cancer screening program. “Then we estimate the health gains (from those interventions) and report back to our academic and policy end users on which interventions appear to have a big impact, versus a small impact, and which are cost effective.” Professor Blakely explains that this particular skillset also applies to modelling COVID-19 infection control and exit strategy models. “We have three exit strategies out of this COVID epidemic. One, we eliminate, we lock our borders and we h