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Social contact surveys are an important tool to assess infection risks within populations, and the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions on social behaviour during disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. Numerous longitudinal…
Characterizing sexual contact networks is essential for understanding sexually transmitted infections, but principled parameter inference for mechanistic network models remains challenging. We develop a discrete-time simulation framework…
Contact patterns play a key role in the spread of respiratory infectious diseases in human populations. During the COVID-19 pandemic the regular contact patterns of the population has been disrupted due to social distancing both imposed by…
Social contact matrices are essential tools in infectious disease epidemiology as they quantify close-range human contact patterns which directly drive the transmission of airborne infectious diseases. In this work we propose a Bayesian…
Capturing the structure of a population and characterising contacts within the population are key to reliable projections of infectious disease. Two main elements of population structure -- contact heterogeneity and age -- have been…
Capturing the structured mixing within a population is key to the reliable projection of infectious disease dynamics and hence informed control. Both heterogeneity in the number of contacts and age-structured mixing have been repeatedly…
Understanding the factors that impact how a communicable disease like COVID-19 spreads is of central importance to mitigate future outbreaks. Traditionally, epidemic surveillance and forecasting analyses have focused on epidemiological data…
Improving health worldwide will require rigorous quantification of population-level trends in health status. However, global-level surveys are not available, forcing researchers to rely on fragmentary country-specific data of varying…
Analysing age-specific mortality, fertility, and migration patterns is a crucial task in demography with significant policy relevance. In practice, such analysis is challenging when studying a large number of subpopulations, due to small…
Face-to-face contacts between individuals contribute to shape social networks and play an important role in determining how infectious diseases can spread within a population. It is thus important to obtain accurate and reliable…
The unprecedented behavioural responses of societies have been evidently shaping the COVID-19 pandemic, yet it is a significant challenge to accurately monitor the continuously changing social mixing patterns in real-time. Contact matrices,…
We consider a flexible Bayesian evidence synthesis approach to model the age-specific transmission dynamics of COVID-19 based on daily mortality counts. The temporal evolution of transmission rates in populations containing multiple types…
In February 2020 the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 was reported in Germany. Since then the local public health offices have been responsible to monitor and react to the dynamics of the pandemic. One of their major tasks is to…
Contact-tracing is an essential tool in order to mitigate the impact of pandemic such as the COVID-19. In order to achieve efficient and scalable contact-tracing in real time, digital devices can play an important role. While a lot of…
We study frequentist properties of a Bayesian high-dimensional multivariate linear regression model with correlated responses. The predictors are separated into many groups and the group structure is pre-determined. Two features of the…
In this study, we introduce a novel and comprehensive extension of a Bayesian spatio-temporal disease mapping model that explicitly accounts for gender-specific effects of meteorological exposures. Leveraging fine-scale weekly mortality and…
Social contact patterns are key drivers of infectious disease transmission. During the COVID-19 pandemic, differences between pre-COVID and COVID-era contact rates were widely attributed to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as…
Acute respiratory diseases are transmitted over networks of social contacts. Large-scale simulation models are used to predict epidemic dynamics and evaluate the impact of various interventions, but the contact behavior in these models is…
Indirect standardization is widely used in disease mapping to control for confounding, but relies on restrictive assumptions that may bias estimates if violated. Using data on suicide-related emergency calls, this study highlights such…
The acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic has made apparent the need for decision support based upon accurate epidemic modeling. This process is substantially hampered by under-reporting of cases and related data incompleteness issues. In…