LAUSR

Description The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted important considerations for modeling future pandemics The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the critical role that quick and robust risk assessment can play during epidemics of emerging pathogens to guide evidence-based policy-making. Generating such assessments, however, is a challenging task because the estimation of key quantities such as the incidence and severity of infection, the transmission potential, the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), and vaccine effectiveness is affected by multiple sources of error. Complex epidemic dynamics further blur assessments. Modeling has proved critical to help tackle these issues in the context of COVID-19, through the detailed analysis of surveillance data and epidemiological investigations. However, additional challenges are emerging now that the most acute phase of the pandemic is over, and it is important to learn from this experience to improve the response to future pandemics.