Launch of Covid-19 Pandemic Trade-offs web-tool
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Please join Professor Nancy Baxter, Head, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health and Professor Tony Blakely, Epidemiologist, & Public Health Medicine Specialist, for the launch of a new COVID-19 Pandemic Trade-offs web-tool.
Professor Blakely and his team have updated their model that was used for Victoria’s Roadmap out of the second wave. Users can simulate the next 12 months in Victoria as vaccines roll-out and see the effect of selecting a combination of 648 possible scenarios in:
- Policy response setting
- Levels of vaccine coverage achieved
- Varying effectiveness of vaccines at lowering transmission
- Varying infectious of SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. new variants)
This publicly available tool will allow anyone - policymakers, health experts and the public alike - to view the impact of future infection rates and chances of further outbreaks as vaccine coverage increases, borders relax, and allowing for varying effectiveness of the vaccine at preventing transmission.
We hope you can join us at this launch to hear more about the tool from Professor Blakely who will also demonstrate how users can examine simulated weekly infection rates and health impacts and share what he and his team believe are the key learnings:
- Future infection rates are highly sensitive to the infectiousness (i.e. R0) of the virus that might arrive in Australia as we open borders
- Relaxing policy settings too soon (e.g. opening borders too rapidly, pivoting to ‘living with the virus’ too early) will likely lead to large outbreaks
- Unsurprisingly, high vaccine coverage and high effectiveness of vaccines at lowering transmission are important for lessening future community transmission.
Professor Blakely will be taking questions from guests at the event.