Digital Futures, in partnership with The University of Manchester, The Christabel Pankhurst Institute, ECH Alliance and Health Innovation Manchester, hosted Reflections on Modelling the Covid-19 Pandemic, the final GM Connected Health Ecosystem event of 2025!
The event was held at The Christabel Pankhurst Building on Thursday 4th December 2025. It hosted three academic speakers; Professor Ian Hall, Professor Lorenzo Pellis, Professor Thomas House, and one NHS speaker, Dr Shazaad Ahmad.
Professor Ian Hall, Professor of Mathematical Epidemiology and Statistics at The University of Manchester and the Deputy Director (Digital Health) of the Christabel Pankhurst Institute, was the Chair of the event and provided an introduction to the Pankhurst, Digital Futures and Healthier Futures.
Following the introduction, Ian presented his talk, titled Providing analytical support for social care setting and advice to SAGE. Ian discussed using the Hazard assessment for assessing impact. He provided intervention examples for each stage, from the initial Ingress hazard to the middle-stage Transmission hazard, followed by the final Outbreak hazard. Ian also covered assessing mitigation, the wider impact and the role of adherence. You can watch Ian's presentation here.
Professor Lorenzo Pellis, Professor of Mathematical Biology at The University of Manchester, presented his talk, Providing reproduction number estimates to policy teams, next. Lorenzo provided in-depth data on severity estimates, real-time medium-term projections, beyond competing hazards, and more. Positive and negative personal considerations were also reflected upon. You can watch Lorenzo's presentation here.
Professor Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, gave a presentation on Providing analytical support for a large community COVID study. Thomas spoke about prevalence estimation, as well as multi-level regression and poststratification. He also discussed household transmission and its data. You can watch Thomas' presentation here.
Dr Shazaad Ahmad, Doctor at the NHS and Honorary Senior Lecturer, presented his talk on Providing analytical support for predicting hospital demand. Shazaad spoke about the need for hospital demand modelling, explained the MFT model and its access to data, and concluded his presentation with his hopes for the future, including MFT linking with other trusts. You can watch Shazaad's presentation here.
After the final presentation, a breakout session was hosted by Ian, allowing attendees an informal group discussion with the speakers. You can find out the main topics of discussion below.
Key Takeaways from the Breakout Session (and speaker Q&As)
The Difference in Approaches Across the UK:
- Reginal infection networks are beginning to be set up, in preparation for a future pandemic.
- England suffered as it did not have one singular NHS, unlike other countries within the UK.
- Scotland were miles ahead on analytics and data, operating extremely well.
Contact Tracing:
- Contact tracing needed to be embedded.
- Contact tracing failed at a local level.
- Contact tracing faced regional issues.
First Wave Considerations:
- During the first wave, people did not present the usual symptoms of Covid-19.
- During the first wave, people knew hospitals were a dangerous place and did not attend due to fear, especially minoritised communities in the UK.
- These factors may have had an effect on data.
- Collecting data may be a huge burden on the individuals involves, especially staff and patients in hospitals.
Juniper and SAGE Papers:
- Hoped that during the pandemic SAGE Papers could have had the same stature as academic journals, as SAGE has as much peer review, and would have helped media perceptions.
- Juniper brings together academic modellers across the country and has centres of excellence.
- Modellers use real world data sets and can showcase what can be done so that others may follow, and all can learn from each other.
- Modellers can engage with partners to find out what data assets are out there and what they can do to work together.
Future Questions:
- Did we mistrust the public by not telling them the complexity of Covid-19?
- Do we need to be better at communication with public and developing trust?
- How would we model the people not attending hospital?
We want to thank all the speakers, attendees, partners, and staff who made this event possible. Keep posted on our Digital Futures Eventbrite to never miss a future GM Connected Health Ecosystem event!
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