Grant: Alliance Grants

As the pace of globally significant infectious disease outbreaks is accelerating, a "once in a century" pandemic, such as COVID-19, is likely to occur again within this decade. Speed in dealing with such a crisis will make the difference between life and death for millions of people. To be ready, we must dramatically improve both the timeliness and the resolution of our situational awareness allowing us to see what is happening with geographic, demographic and genomic detail. One facet of such an awareness is the creation not only of accurate and timely forecasts, but also nowcasts (predictions of the current situation), and backcasts (predictions of the recent past) of epidemic surveillance signals. In recent years, dozens of teams across the world have embraced the task of producing periodic forecasts and nowcasts of disease activity, spurred by epidemic forecasting challenges organized by groups within the US federal government and in Europe. However, these teams have implemented, in parallel, many similar analysis and forecasting tools and pipelines, and, while many are open source, no popular, user-friendly software ecosystem has coalesced to facilitate these tasks. Teams therefore rely on their own past frameworks when faced with new challenges, rather than using and validating innovative methodology from across the community. Additionally, public health professionals frequently rely upon these external models to access real-time estimation of key epidemic parameters---for example, the growth rate, the instantaneous reproduction number, the case-fatality ratio---rather than being able to apply estimation routines tailored to their specific needs. This international collaborative proposal aims to address both of these deficiencies by developing a family of software packages to enable easier and higher-quality epidemic data analysis and modelling with user-friendliness and interoperability in mind. This collaboration will better equip Canada to deal with future influenza and COVID-19 seasons and create a foundation for handling the next pandemic.