bcdata Colloquium Series: Caroline Colijn

The coronavirus that was reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019 has caused much concern in the media, in scientific and in public health communities due to its human-to-human transmission, virulence and transmissibility. In this era of open data, the scientific community has been quick to respond, with a wide range of early analyses estimating key epidemiological parameters and dynamics: the basic reproduction number, the serial interval, the time of origin of the virus and forecasts of future importations and spread. In this talk I will describe how this analysis is done and point out key areas of uncertainty as a new infection emerges. There is also, more broadly in the field, considerable interest in using genetic data in epidemiology, as these data can give a high-resolution picture of transmission and pathogen evolution. I will describe some of my group’s work on genomic epidemiology and phylogenetic trees and will show how these tools can be applied to the coronavirus data that are available as of early February 2020.