Epidemiological Surveillance (non-spatial)

Question 1

Syndromic surveillance

Answer 1

• Early detection
• Relatively cheap
• Higher chances for misdiagnosis
• Little information on pathogen evolution

Question 2

Genomic surveillance

Answer 2

• Detailed pathogen information
• phylogenetic analysis and tracking (Drug resistance and Mutations)
• Identify new/emerging pathogens
• Relatively expensive
• Requires special expertise
• Tends to be slower at detecting new outbreaks

Question 3

Serological surveillance

Answer 3

• disease burden
• past pathogen exposure
• May not reflect current infections
• susceptible to cross-reactivity
• expensive

Question 4

Wastewater surveillance

Answer 4

• Early detection
• Can measure overall disease burden
• Cost-effective + non-invasive
• Difficult to identify individuals infected

Question 5

What are some of the challenges with public health surveillance at the beginning of disease outbreaks?

Answer 5

• speed of data collection, cleaning, sharing
• non-representation
• changing case definitions
• testing inaccuracies (false negatives / positives)

Question 6

Describe in your own words what the time-varying reprodution number Rt represents? Further, list the data sources necessary to estimate the Rt?

Answer 6

• daily case data; date of onset
• case umber
• serial interval distribution

Question 7

How to viusalise?

Answer 7

• restrict dates
• plot graph of new cases against time

Question 8

estimate Rt

Answer 8

• weekly chronological sliding windows
• specific the mean and deviation of the serial interval

Question 9

estimate the time-varying reproduction number for each variant separately

Answer 9

• estimate case incidence of each variant: lineage proportion estimates from genomic surveillance
• visualise as proportion across time
• narrow the date range
• multiply daily case incidence by proportion of each variant
• ensure correct mean and standard deviation

Question 10

travel history data

Answer 10

• case importation
• proportion of cases imported each day
• re-estimae Rt
• visualise original and adjusted Rts to determine change
• likely over-estimation

Question 11

Uncertainty in Rt

Answer 11

• Under-reporting
• Spatial scale of reporting
• Health care seeking

Question 12

Serial interval distribution

Answer 12

time between primary and secondary case symptom onset