On the evening of 16 October 2024, University of Manchester’s Professor Ian Hall, OBE, presented Challenges in Modelling Infectious Disease Outbreaks, a public seminar co-organised by the IMA and the Institute of Physics’ London and South East Branch, which was given at the Aldermaston Recreational Society in Berkshire.
The enthusiastic, mixed audience of about 40 ranged from early career professionals to retired scientists and mathematicians. Professor Hall encouraged dialogue and a good level of interaction between him and many in the audience endured throughout his informative, insightful seminar that exceeded one hour.
In the content of his seminar, Professor Hall detailed the epidemiology models that are characterised by the compartmental “SIR” modelling technique, where a population exposed to a transmissable infectious disease is divided into interacting bodies that are classed as either Susceptible, Infectious, or Recovered. The presumed interplay of these classes determines the form of differential equations that need solving to yield the desired number and distribution of infected cases.
Importantly, Professor Hall showed how the data gathered in past events – such as the bubonic plague in Cairo, Egypt in the early 1800s and the pneumonic plague in Johannesburg, South Africa in the early 1900s – has been used to substantiate the modelling technique.
Yet he cautioned that the challenges of disease surveillance and the availability of reliable, broad-ranging empirical data limit the accuracy of the model’s solutions thus limiting the pragmatic advice that can be given to the authorities serving the UK’s population. In particular, Professor Hall has used his modelling technique in parallel with assessing the risks of infection versus the psychological damage of isolation, to advise UK authorities on how to effectively manage care homes with elderly residents during infectious disease outbreaks such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
Images courtesy of Prof Ian Hall
