When interpreting disease models, it takes a village
CAHFS News

DVM/PhD Summer Scholar Julia Baker describes her experience with COVID-19 modeling

By Julia Baker

Each summer the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) supports a group of veterinary student researchers through the Summer Scholars program, allowing them to explore the diverse research options available to veterinary professionals. However, as the novel coronavirus swept across the globe, many summer projects were up in the air. Though many labs began reduced operations, the CVM’s Center for Animal Health and Food Safety (CAHFS) put out a call for Summer Scholars who had been displaced—this is how I found my summer project working with CAHFS.

Amidst the news briefings by government officials suggesting that they were “following science” and using “expert models” to determine their next course of action in the COVID-19 pandemic, Andres Perez, DVM, PhD, director of CAHFS, gave Summer Scholars a crash course in what modeling disease outbreaks actually entails. 

Our team of CAHFS Summer Scholars have been learning to think critically about what meaningful information disease outbreak models can provide using the disease modeling platform Epidemix, which has recently integrated a model for COVID-19. The Epidemix platform was created by an international team of researchers and faculty including the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in the United Kingdom, City University of Hong Kong, and the Epi-interactive team of New Zealand.

Working with this user-friendly tool, we have been investigating the current COVID-19 pandemic and the outbreak in the Twin Cities, from looking at the impact of social distancing to the consequences of premature reopening. With the model already built for us in the Epidemix platform, early veterinary students can better understand the impact of these individual parameters on the development and course of an infectious disease outbreak.

The truism “all models are wrong, but some are useful” is well established within the epidemiology community, indicating the danger of over-reliance on disease modeling. Though these models may seem to produce straightforward outputs, what we began investigating with the guidance from Dr. Perez is how to critically think about what meaningful information disease outbreak models can provide. 

It became clear that veterinarians and scientists who work primarily in the biological realm need access and training on disease models so that we can investigate for ourselves how they function, their limitations, and how informative they can be. 

“The Epidemix tool was imagined to make people able to develop teaching material using a simple software to enhance understanding of models,” says Guillaume Fournié, DVM, PhD, researcher at the RVC. The backend code from Dr. Fournié combined with the frontend user interface by Epi-interactive allows novice modelers to use the tool in a variety of ways. 

“My main interest in models is their ability to generate hypotheses, or to test hypotheses, to explore processes of transmission, rather than making predictions,” says Dr. Fournié. This is exactly how we have been using it here at the College of Veterinary Medicine, and how it can continue to be used as a teaching tool.

Headshot photo of Julia Baker
Julia Baker

After completing the first year of DVM studies, I had a basic understanding of the course of a viral infection on an individual, but standard disease models take the individual disease course and scale it up to the population level. Now, I have been learning about how mathematical equations and computational models can be used to predict the impact of an infection on this larger scale using standard input values such as transmission rates, contact frequency, and how infectious a pathogen is.

Tools like Epidemix make disease modeling accessible and digestible for those of us who may not have the data science or computer science backgrounds to develop our own model. The goal of our summer project is to demonstrate how these tools can be used by subject matter experts to improve the understanding and utility of models amongst veterinarians and others working at the interface between policy makers and researchers.  

 

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