[Nature Reviews Physics] Modelling COVID-19

Nature Reviews Physics, May 6 2020

Alessandro Vespignani, Huaiyu Tian, Christopher Dye, James O. Lloyd-Smith, Rosalind M. Eggo, Munik Shrestha, Samuel V. Scarpino, Bernardo Gutierrez, Moritz U. G. Kraemer, Joseph Wu, Kathy Leung, Gabriel M. Leung

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, mathematical epidemiologists share their views on what models reveal about how the disease has spread, the current state of play and what work still needs to be done.

University of Hong Kong’s Joseph Wu, Kathy Leung and Gabriel M. Leung advocate for the urgent need of antibody testing:

• Rapid and reliable assessment of the clinical severity of pandemic pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is a top priority in pandemic response
• The number of reported case counts are inevitably biased depending on the proportion of symptomatic infections and the availability of testing
• Seroepidemiological studies provide the most direct and reliable data for estimating true epidemic size because they use measurements of antibody response across a population to infer infective exposure to (and, by extension, immunity against) the pandemic pathogen
• Long-term longitudinal serological follow-up of recovered individuals can reveal the strength and duration of protective immunity and thus the probability of reinfection

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