Model answers or trivial pursuits?

I've had a number of occasions to use my stochastic SIR demo since I first tested it out on a Melbourne Maths and Science Meetup audience, including last year's Communicable Diseases Control Conference in Canberra. I used it most recently in our school seminar on Wednesday 11 March, for which Jodie McVernon chose the title Model answers or trivial pursuits? Using epidemiological models to support COVID-19 preparedness and response. Jodie, Freya Shearer, and I talked about collaborative modelling efforts to better understand the transmissibility and severity of COVID-19, and how we had been using models to help identify effective and proportionate measures for health sector and whole-of-society responses. What a way to welcome our new head of school, Nancy Baxter!

There's been a huge amount of work done to date, by an ever-expanding network of collaborators. It has been genuinely rewarding to play a role in national and international efforts to respond to COVID-19, but it's also been extremely stressful and exhausting. And it's been terrifying to be intimately aware that my work is feeding into decision-making at the highest levels of government in the midst of an emerging global crisis. I am keenly looking forward to the day where our physical distancing measures have been relaxed and, in the company of close friends, I can look back at this time as something that happened to all of us.