It's back! For budding infectious disease modellers with some R experience, @LSHTM's Modern Techniques in Modelling short course is Sept 9–12 and has just a few places still open. Learn to use ODEs, stochastic models, networks, and agent-based models in R.

Deadline is 10th September. Apply here: .(5/5).

You'll be joining the @NIHRresearch Health Protection Research Unit in Immunisation, a group of 30ish researchers at @LSHTM, @UKHSA and @Cambridge_Uni with expertise across epi, modelling, econ, social science, and more. (4/5).

We're looking for someone with skills and experience in infectious disease modelling, health economics, or both. Do these plots stir powerful feelings? This is for you. (3/5)

You'll be working with researchers in @cmmid_lshtm and @UKHSA, preparing reports for advisory bodies like JCVI, and writing scientific papers. (2/5).

Calling all health economists and/or infectious disease modellers. 🚨🦠📈💱😷❤️‍🩹. @LSHTM is hiring a Research Fellow or Assistant Professor to work on evaluating policy for vaccine-preventable infectious diseases in the UK. Posting here: (1/5).

It's taught by researchers at @cmmid_lshtm and is designed for PhD students, postdocs, and industry professionals who need to develop and run infectious disease transmission models. We have about 10 places left!

For any infectious disease scientists with some coding experience (e.g. in R), @LSHTM's Modern Techniques in Modelling short course is coming up (April 17–20). The course covers techniques in modelling such as ODEs, stochastic models, networks, and agent-based modelling.

RT @BarnardResearch: My research (with @_nickdavies @cmmid_lshtm @markjit & John Edmunds) is published in @NatureComms 🥳. This is the culmi….

RT @katiito: Job alert: modelling #postdoc available in the beautiful city of #Edinburgh working with me and a great team of people (incl.….

RT @TimesONeill: NEW: Health sec @sajidjavid marks World ME Day by pledging a delivery plan to confront this "incredibly disabling conditio….

Hence the importance of testing yourself before seeing your friends and family and before / after going out to places where the risk of transmission is high.

The older and vulnerable age groups drive the majority of morbidity and mortality coming out of any model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. If people exercise even a little bit of caution around their vulnerable/elderly relatives this Christmas, that will make a HUGE difference.

If in South Africa, there was higher protection among young people prior to Omicron, this same effect would tend to *decrease* the IHR resulting from Omicron if it was shifting the average Omicron case younger relative to Delta.

If the fraction of highly-protected older people infected with Omicron is big enough relative to the very small fraction who got Delta, then in theory this could even increase the average IHR even though it is decreasing within each age group.

To the extent that this shift happens, the overall realised severity across all age groups (i.e. the average IHR) will not decrease as much as the above plots suggest.

For a lot of countries, including the UK, this means that the Omicron wave will tend to infect *relatively* more vulnerable older people than the Delta wave, which after all was really primarily in young people.

The same principle that makes Omicron relatively less severe WITHIN each age/risk group—its better ability to infect those with preexisting protection—will tend to shift the case mix, relative to Delta, AMONG the age/risk groups into those that have relatively better protection.

There is a really important point, though, that some hugely helpful explainers @JamesWard73 @nataliexdean @jburnmurdoch have so far not really focused on (not saying they have overlooked this, just that I haven't seen them tweet about it yet. ). And here it is:.

New papers by @imperialcollege (report 50) show that A&E visits among Omicron cases are reduced by 30-40%. The former would be "70% baseline severity" which looks like this in practice (these plots are outputs from our model btw which we will add to the next preprint version)