Six years since the inception of Digital Contact Tracing!
We've shown that privacy-preserving DCT could play a key, low-cost role in mitigating future outbreaks whilst simultaneously gathering valuable epi insights in real time.
michellekendall.github.io/2026/03/05/d...
Excellent detail on the latest “super flu” situation here, featuring @jameshay.bsky.social from Oxford Uni’s PSI @psioxford.bsky.social
Spoiler: it’s bad but “super” is a bit of a stretch
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...
1/ Seasonal influenza summary from latest @ukhsa.bsky.social surveillance report. #IDSky #EpiSky 🧪
🗓️ Based on data up to week 49 2025 (01-07 Dec 2025)
📊 Increases in activity measured by multiple indicators. Influenza circulating at medium levels in England.
Report 🔗: www.gov.uk/government/s...
H3N2 preprint: there are concerns of a severe incoming influenza season due to the drifted H3N2 K clade. We at @psioxford.bsky.social analysed epi data and ran scenario models to see what we could discern about K clade transmission dynamics: zenodo.org/records/1770....
(1/18)
If you've heard murmurings about the new H3N2 flu 🦠 strain you may appreciate this excellent work by @jameshay.bsky.social & team, putting the available data for England in context of previous seasons and mapping out likely ways it could play out over the winter.
📄 zenodo.org/records/1770...
Graph showing positive tests for flu, COVID-19 and RSV
Graph showing positive tests by age for flu
VirusWatch infographic
Dr Jamie Lopez Bernal, Consultant Epidemiologist at UKHSA, said: Flu continues to increase among younger people despite the school half-term break. We expect the holidays gave flu a ‘firebreak’ and dampened the spread, but we do now expect to see further increases as people return to school and work. With this upward trend continuing, it’s more important than ever that those eligible for a free flu vaccine come forward.
🆕 #UKHSAVirusWatch: The latest flu, COVID-19 & RSV data from our weekly winter surveillance report.
🟢 Flu has continued to increase - especially in children and young adults - in what has been an unusually early start to the influenza season.
Read the full report below. 🔎
https://bit.ly/47shfmB
🆕 #UKHSAVirusWatch: The latest flu, COVID-19 and RSV data from our weekly winter surveillance report.
Flu has increased, particularly in children, and is now above baseline levels. This is an unusually early start to the influenza season
Find the full report here: https://bit.ly/3Lh27zJ
Want to build an interactive dashboard so others can explore epidemic scenarios? For COVID, @ngdavies.bsky.social spearheaded a great drag-and-drop approach, which made use of the JavaScript-based nature of RShiny... 1/
I’m delighted to share that I’ve just started work on this @cepi.net project in Christophe Fraser’s group @christophraser.bsky.social
cepi.net//landmark-af...
New paper: we argue that a promising approach for studying mpox vaccine effectiveness in Central Africa to incorporate mpox vaccination + testing data into existing cohort studies, especially those for HIV/STIs.
www.thelancet.com/journals/ebi...
"I have long felt that the risks of sharing your data - the possibility that your information will fall into the hands of people who are up to no good - are given far more prominence that the potential rewards in the form of advances in medicine."
open.substack.com/pub/rorycell... This post about the importance of knowing the difference between truth tellers and myth makers in healthcare has already attracted a comment from a member of the “plandemic” community which nicely makes my point about the dangers of disinformation
New paper: long-term trends in antibiotic resistance show signs of stabilisation (thread). journals.plos.org/plospathogen...
Right? Maybe there are good reasons for the scheduling, and only a small minority of us working part/flexi hours and not using after school clubs. But if we had been considered even for a moment I would expect them to at least offer a recording, and I can’t see one mentioned…
Screenshot of details for a Royal Statistical Society event, titled "Balancing the Equation: Work, Family, and Career Growth in Statistics and Data Science". It is scheduled for Monday 3 March from 3 to 4pm.
🪧 What do we want? 🪧
Help balancing work and family life!
🪧 When do we want it? 🪧
School pick-up time!
@psioxford.bsky.social are hosting the International Pandemic Sciences Conference on 30 June – 1 July 2025 in Oxford and online, theme
'Getting ahead of the curve' 📈
Visit the website now to:
➡️ Register to attend
➡️ Submit an abstract
www.psi.ox.ac.uk/conference25
#episky #IDsky
Interesting thread about calculating the reproduction number and reflecting on its utility
Hinch & Panovska‑Griffiths et al, Nature Sci Rep: we quantified how variable mpox case ascertainment delays over time in the UK distorted the relationship between growing case counts and the true epidemic growth
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Front cover of Science Magazine shows a large crowd of people watching a football match, with the title TRANSMISSION EVENT: Digital contact tracing for COVID-19
Example of app-based epidemic monitoring in England during the Euro 2020 football tournament. A graph shows how the daily number of close contact events and transmission events detected by the NHS COVID-19 app in England had sharp and increasing peaks on days of England football matches.
Kendall & Ferretti et al, Science: we showed anonymised data from app-based contact tracing enables analytics for epidemic monitoring that is virtually real-time, high-resolution & national scale. Nice Science mag front cover 👀 (Remember outdoors safer than indoors!)
045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/monitoring
Image shows how the probability of reported infection with SARS-CoV-2 among people notified by the NHS COVID-19 App increases with the risk score calculated by the app.
👋 Hello World! Some of our papers this year ICYMI
Ferretti & Wymant et al, Nature: using 7 million digitally recorded COVID exposures, we found app-based contact tracing successfully measured the actual risk of transmission and we decomposed contributors to risk 045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/risk_measure...
Another opportunity to come work @universityofoxford.bsky.social on the @oxmartinschool.bsky.social project on *Digital Pandemic Preparedness* together with Profs. Christl Donnelly, Christophe Fraser, Melinda Mills, Michael Parker, Luca Ferretti and me.
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...
New article by me & Lucas at Our World in Data!
The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have killed more than 25 million people; it caused grief & suffering among their loved ones, impacted people's health worldwide & disrupted work & lifestyles.
We look back on the pandemic with 17 charts:
Really handy! Thanks!
Shout out to everyone who worked on the NHS COVID-19 app, particularly my amazing academic collaborators Christophe Fraser, @chriswymant.bsky.social, Luca Ferretti, @daphnetsallis.bsky.social, @alicele.bsky.social and Xavier Didelot who all played a central role in the work I've described.
2. Motivations for pandemic preparedness. Digital contact tracing apps could:
a. play a key, low-cost role in mitigating future outbreaks.
b. gather valuable insights in real time, helping to evaluate and fine-tune our choices of public health interventions (towards minimising negative impacts).
To round up. Why is all this important?
1. Retrospective insights:
a. we've quantified the epidemiological effectiveness of digital contact tracing.
b. we've found out more about COVID-19: how and when it spread during the years the app was active, in lots of detail.
Further results and more details are of course available at the links provided, with discussion of subtleties, limitations etc. to unpack this big list of statements.
For easy-read versions with just a bit more detail, you may prefer the corresponding blog posts: michellekendall.github.io/blog/
Science magazine cover showing England football fans in Wembley stadium, titled "Transmission Event: Digital contact tracing for COVID-19"
Figure showing contacts and transmissions associated with England match days during the Euros
Christmas and the Euros were associated with big increases in spread, driven by synchronised (likely inter-generational) meet-ups across England and/or Wales. Excess transmissions on Euro match days accounted for 29% of all app-recorded transmissions during the month-long tournament scim.ag/86t
Figure showing relative daily fractions of contacts which were from households, recurring, single day or fleeting encounters, and the corresponding proportions of transmissions. Christmas Day stands out as having many more household contacts and fewer fleeting contacts than usual.
Plus the data captured fine-grained insights into the drivers of transmission, including the effects of day-of-the-week, setting (longer vs more fleeting contact), and geographical region.
Figure showing various estimators of the reproduction number R over the course of the epidemic
Analysis of app data provided a leading indicator of the reproduction number R, available at least 5 days earlier than other estimates. This provided valuable situational awareness for policy makers.
