Medical Research Foundation Emerging Leaders Prize: Evaluating the Efficiency of Population-Based Infectious Disease Surveillance

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government invested massively in population-based surveillance programmes like the COVID-19 Infection Survey (CIS), which provided near real-time estimates of infection burden and epidemic spread but at great financial cost. This project, funded through a research prize awarded to Associate Professor Koen Pouwels, proposes a programme of work aimed at designing more efficient infectious disease surveillance strategies to ensure rational healthcare resource use during future epidemics. Building on the wealth of real-world data generated during the COVID-19 pandemic, simulation modelling is proposed to evaluate the returns-on-investment of a range of surveillance strategies in various counterfactual epidemic scenarios accounting for key factors like viral evolution and time-varying behaviour change. Then, a discrete choice experiment among members of the general population is proposed to help better understand how intention to engage in infection prevention behaviours like mask wearing and social distancing depends on the information provided by national surveillance systems. These findings will contribute to pandemic preparedness by providing data on the design and impacts of efficient infectious disease surveillance.