The dynamics of disease

“Our profession began with infectious diseases,” says Professor Tony Blakely.

“So, if I break it down and say epidemic and -ology, which equals study, we are the study of epidemics – epidemiology,” he says.

“My day job is to model the effect of interventions on the population’s health.

“Sometimes I look in the rear vision mirror of the car and sometimes I look out the front window and I actually forecast the future, under business as usual. Then I layer an intervention over that, like a tax on sugary drinks or a colorectal cancer screening program.

“Then we estimate the health gains (from those interventions) and report back to our academic and policy end users on which interventions appear to have a big impact, versus a small impact, and which are cost effective.”

Professor Blakely explains that this particular skillset also applies to modelling COVID-19 infection control and exit strategy models.

“We have three exit strategies out of this COVID epidemic. One, we eliminate, we lock our borders and we hunker down until a vaccine arrives. The second strategy is the one people call suppression or controlled adaptation because you really are adapting,” he says.

“The third option is we’ll protect our elderly, we’ll protect those with co-morbidities, we’ll get the best treatments possible, but we’re going to let this infection wash through society until such time we get to a number of people being infected that they’re therefore immune - we have what we call herd immunity.

“There are different pros and cons of each of those three strategies.”

Episode recorded: April 20, 2020.

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.

Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.

Co-production: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.

Image: Getty Images.