Joe Brooks (University of Manchester)

Speaker: Joe Brooks (University of Manchester)
Talk Title: New and existing statistical methods for analysing household stratified final size data.
Abstract:  Households represent a key unit of interest in infectious disease epidemiology, in both empirical studies and mathematical modelling. The within-household transmission potential of an infectious disease is often summarised in terms of a secondary attack ratio, defined as the average proportion of susceptible contacts within a household to be infected following an import of infection into that household. Despite their widespread use, estimates of secondary attack ratio depend on the mixture of household compositions seen during the study period, making them poor indicators of transmission potential in new populations and future epidemic phases. Extending estimates of transmission potential to new populations instead requires estimates of person-to-person transmission rates which can be convoluted with data on population structure to parameterise mechanistic transmission models. 
This talk will first explore the current state of statistical methods used to analyse household stratified final size data, showing preliminary results from a critical appraisal of methods used for COVID-19 data between 2020 and 2023. We will then demonstrate a new MCMC imputation method which seeks to infer both the transmission intensity and the unreported household structure which together drive the epidemic and can be run on household epidemiological data reported at varying levels of resolution. As well as providing a tool for analysing existing datasets, these results also aim to encourage the reporting of higher resolution outputs in future epidemiological studies.