I'm excited to announce a new paper with Martina Reichmuth and @c_althaus , out now in PLOS Pathogens!
We used phylogenetics & modelling to investigate the introduction & expansion of #SARSCoV2 Alpha & Delta variants into #Switzerland & to simulate different interventions.
1/17
RT @fibke
Pandemic casualties reached 22 million globally, with 46% in Asia and 83% in developing countries. As of last week, COVID remained the 3rd leading global cause of death.
Call it over but that’s an awful lot of people who continue to die daily.
1/
RT @Knutti_ETH
What an amazing planet.
And what amazing technology to observe it in such detail from space, to understand, predict weather, and ultimately help mitigate climate impacts.
The first image from EUMETSAT’s newest satellite, Meteosat Third Generation.
https://www.eumetsat.int/features/discover-first-images-mtg-i1
The effective reproductive number Rt has taken a central role in the scientific, political, and public discussion during the COVID-19 pandemic, with numerous real-time estimates of this quantity routinely published. Disagreement between estimates can be substantial and may lead to confusion among decision-makers and the general public. In this work, we compare different estimates of the national-level effective reproductive number of COVID-19 in Germany in 2020 and 2021. We consider the agreement between estimates from the same method but published at different time points (within-method agreement) as well as retrospective agreement across different approaches (between-method agreement). Concerning the former, estimates from some methods are very stable over time and hardly subject to revisions, while others display considerable fluctuations. To evaluate between-method agreement, we reproduce the estimates generated by different groups using a variety of statistical approaches, standardizing analytical choices to assess how they contribute to the observed disagreement. These analytical choices include the data source, data pre-processing, assumed generation time distribution, statistical tuning parameters, and various delay distributions. We find that in practice, these auxiliary choices in the estimation of Rt may affect results at least as strongly as the selection of the statistical approach. They should thus be communicated transparently along with the estimates. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement Johannes Bracher was supported by the Helmholtz Foundation via the project SIMCARD. Johannes Bracher's work was moreover partly funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) -- project number 512483310. Sam Abbott and Sebastian Funk were supported by The Wellcome Trust (210758/Z/18/Z). ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Yes Data and code to reproduce the presented results can be found at https://github.com/ElisabethBrockhaus/Rt\_estimate\_reconstruction and https://github.com/KITmetricslab/reproductive_numbers.
Great @ECDC_EU report on the lessons learned from the #COVID19 pandemic. Valuable information for the upcoming discussions on the revision of the epidemic act and pandemic preparedness in Switzerland. @MCIDBern @BAG_OFSP_UFSP #xp
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RT @ECDC_EU
#JustPublished!
What did we learn from the #COVID19 #pandemic?
How did Europe respond to this public health crisis, and what could have been done better? Are we better prepared for the future?
…
https://twitter.com/ECDC_EU/status/1653373880096915458
RT @CERN
#OnThisDay thirty years ago, in 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web software to the public.
Proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the web was originally created to allow scientists and institutes from all over the globe who were working on CERN data to share information accurately… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1652644181230206977
“#OnThisDay thirty years ago, in 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web software to the public. Proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the web was originally created to allow scientists and institutes from all over the globe who were working on CERN data to share information accurately…”
Dr Emma Hodcroft 
Marcel Salathé
