Difference between revisions of "Community Ebola Modeling Phone Call"

Revision as of 02:22, 2 October 2014

The STEM Community will be holding a weekly phone call for open discussion on Ebola Modeling. Researchers studying Ebola Epidemiology, Modeling of Ebola, and working on Ebola Response, are all invited. It is not necessary or required to be a user or contributor to STEM. All discussion should be open and non-confidential.

The Ebola community call is scheduled to take place most every Weds at 10AM Pacific Daylight time (1PM Eastern Time)
For more information, to add to the agenda, or if you wish to join, please send mailto:judyvdouglas@verizon.net

October 8, 2014 Call

Agenda

tbd

Minutes

Attendees

Discussion

Items from Participants

October 1, 2014 Call

Agenda

1. Introductions
2. Timing for Community Calls
3. Purpose
   1. Not to push one model
   2. Not to advocate one tool
   3. Support Ebola response efforts
4. Eclipse Community Tools
   1. This Call
   2. Newsgroup
   3. Mailing list instructions
5. Overview of Ebola Model and four Ebola Scenarios uploaded to Eclipse
   1. Admin 0 three country model for West Africa
   2. Admin 2 three county models for West Africa
   3. All Africa Model
   4. The Global Model
   5. How to easily change from deterministic to stochastic
   6. Running STEM Headless on server
6. Discussion on Literature models - please add references to this page
7. Discussion on model parameters (latest wisdom, sensitivity analysis)
   1. Should we create a wiki page for ongoing discussion?
   2. Should we create a newsgroup topic for ongoing discussion?
8. Next week's agenda
   1. Who would like to moderate ? We can rotate.
   2. Please send short agenda items to Judy by Monday
   3. Please suggest longer themes for presentation/discussion
9. Items from participants

To receive agenda updates form our mailing list please:

Get an Eclipse ID: [1]
Subscribe to the mailing list [2]
See information on the STEM Community Join the STEM Community

Model documentation will be available on the wiki page Ebola Models

Minutes

Attendees

1. James Kaufman, IBM Research
2. Kun Hu, IBM Research
3. Simone Bianco, IBM Research
4. Judy Douglas, IBM Research
5. Stefan Edlund, IBM Research
6. Caitlin Rivers, Virginia Tech
7. Sherry Towers, Arizona State University
8. Bob Pinner, CDC
9. Mehmet Gunes, University of Nevada, Reno
10. Ira B. Schwartz, US Naval Research Laboratory
11. Christian Althaus, ISPM, University of Bern
12. Pat Selinger, IBM Research
13. Vincent Ruslan, Operon Labs
14. Carlos Castillo-Chavez, Arizona State University
15. Melissa Cefkin, IBM Research
16. Bryan Lewis, Virginia Tech

Discussion

Christian:

• Science paper did not look at how mutations have changed properties of the virus
• Population structure and control measures are quite different from countries
• Parameters similar to previous outbreaks

Carlos:

• This is a much bigger outbreak

Sherry:

• The current Ebola outbreak seems to have relative low fatality rate compare to 90% in the record
• Is asymptomatic transmission playing a role?

Bryan:

• Is case mortality lower?

Sherry:

• It seems to be lower.

Caitlin:

• Up to 80% case fatality
• Infectious period seems to be twice times than the previous outbreak.

Vincent:

• What is the role of asymptomatic transmission. some numbers suggest something is different.

Jamie:

• What is R0 for community, hospital, vs funeral transmission?

Sherry:

• Suggested the transmission at funeral is 2-5 times higher.
• Will provide some papers discussing different R0

Christian:

• Really difficult to quantify different elements of transmission - restricted to total incidence data

Simone:

• Conflicting data on under reported cases.

Sherry:

• Who is collecting data?

Caitlin:

• MOH of respective countries

Bryan Lewis:

• Telecon with Neil Ferguson. Analysis of case listings.
• The current endeavor is to explore these questions.
• The data is partial

Christian:

• STD transmission is probably minor

Everyone:

• We need to get all the literature references in one place

Items from Participants

Caitlin:

• Suggests we create a wiki page on Data
• Ok to link to Caitlin's git hub and blog

Done: see new pages and please feel free to add content
Literature Ebola References 
Data Ebola Reference Data 

Sherry:

• As a statistician, the work is data driven
• We need better data to inform our models

Vincent:

• Also concerned about asymptomatic transmission

Ira:

• Interested in how people adapt their behavior in response to the epidemic outbreak
• Also concerned about asymptomatic infectious classes. Can we back this out to predict asymptomatic?
• Interested in agent-based model to study these type of questions

Christian:

• Interest in opportunity for transmission in different small outbreak in Nigeria on how R0 (reproductive number) changes in a better urban setting where interventions were effective.
• How does R0 depend on healthcare system of the country?

Pat:

• Being in a community, how can we efficient and effective work together, what would help people respond more quickly?
• Using a maillist does not address the issue when people want to share dataset.

Vincent:

• Suggest to have a Ebola mailing
• Parameters show this outbreak is going to be a 12-24 month long

Carlos:

• Asymptomatic individuals: are they infectious or not? Very important in Influenza
• Explore time dependent value of parameter
• Critical to determine which of the additive factors contribute the most to R0 and Reff
• Parameters change with different populations, different practices, different environment that may facilitate the transmission.

Follow up

• Stefan Edlund created a new mail list stem-ebola@eclipse.org that will be active within 24 hours
• Simone Bianco posted these minutes
• James Kaufman created a new wiki page Ebola Reference Data