Covid-19: What we’ve learned about the pandemic and what we keep forgetting

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic has been the most acute global infectious disease emergency in living memory. While it has upended societies and led to more than 600,000 deaths (and counting) in the United States alone, much of the potential impact could be anticipated by epidemiologists as early as February or March 2020. Dr Hanage will discuss how infectious disease epidemiology informs pandemic response from vaccines to handwashing, what we have learned about the virus and what it can do, as well as how we can best manage it. As we enter the second fall and winter of the pandemic in the northern hemisphere, we should learn the lessons the virus has taught, and not forget their cost.

Bio Dr. William Hanage is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the department of Epidemiology, and a faculty member in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. He employs a mix of theoretical and laboratory work to research the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease. After his PhD, he did post doctoral study at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, before being awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Prior to joining the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, he was a Reader in the department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. There he worked extensively developing multilocus sequence typing (MLST; www.mlst.net) and analysis (MLSA) for the study of bacterial pathogens and species, as well as means of analyzing data developed using this method. He is particularly interested in using an evolutionary framework such as methods derived from population genetics to inform epidemiology. In 2012 he received the Fleming Prize for research in Microbiology and was the recipient of a 2012 ICAAC Young Investigator Award from the American Society for Microbiology.