Speaker
Description
Decision-making during public health crises, such as pandemics or epidemics, often relies on evidence from mathematical models produced by public health authorities. In such crises, e.g. the recent COVID-19 pandemic, government and public health authorities in many countries were assisted by academic researchers. However, the practices of modelling for decision-making are different from that of academia, and this clash of cultures hampered the contributions made by academic modellers. In order to improve on this situation and increase preparedness for future crises we have composed a document titled “Handbook of mathematical modelling of infectious diseases for decision-making”. The handbook describes the process of modelling infectious diseases in a chronological order going from preparatory work, implementation, to communication of model results and lastly management of models. The target audience are academic modellers and junior public health officials, and we believe that this handbook has the potential to strengthen collaboration between government authorities and academia, ultimately leading to improved preparedness.
Bibliography
@techreport{gerlee2025handbook,
title = {Handbook of Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases for Decision-Making},
author = {Philip Gerlee and Torbj{\"o}rn Lundh and Oscar Bj{\"o}rnham and Lisa Brouwers and Anders Tegnell},
institution = {Chalmers University of Technology; Public Health Agency of Sweden; Swedish Defence Research Agency; Swedish Armed Forces},
year = {2025},
type = {Report},
url = {https://research.chalmers.se/publication/549809},
note = {Accessed: 2026-03-03},
}
@article{hadley2025does,
title={How does policy modelling work in practice? A global analysis on the use of epidemiological modelling in health crises},
author={Hadley, Liza and Rich, Caylyn and Tasker, Alex and Restif, Olivier and Funk, Sebastian},
journal={PLOS global public health},
volume={5},
number={6},
pages={e0004675},
year={2025},
publisher={Public Library of Science San Francisco, CA USA}
}
@article{gerlee2024evaluation,
title={Evaluation and communication of pandemic scenarios},
author={Gerlee, Philip and Thor{\'e}n, Henrik and J{\"o}ud, Anna Saxne and Lundh, Torbj{\"o}rn and Spreco, Armin and Nordlund, Anders and Brezicka, Thomas and Britton, Tom and Kjellberg, Magnus and K{\"a}llberg, Henrik and others},
journal={The Lancet Digital Health},
volume={6},
number={8},
pages={e543--e544},
year={2024},
publisher={Elsevier}
}
@article{gerlee2021predicting,
title={Predicting regional COVID-19 hospital admissions in Sweden using mobility data},
author={Gerlee, Philip and Karlsson, Julia and Fritzell, Ingrid and Brezicka, Thomas and Spreco, Armin and Timpka, Toomas and J{\"o}ud, Anna and Lundh, Torbj{\"o}rn},
journal={Scientific reports},
volume={11},
number={1},
pages={24171},
year={2021},
publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
}
