Ementorhub

What you'll learn

Review the basics of infections disease epidemiology and transmission and key components of infectious disease models

Present questions that can be answered by infectious disease transmission models and types of models used to answer each type of question

Describe how to assess whether or not a model is “good” or useful for informing policy

Identify the most important considerations for making decisions based on infectious disease transmission models

There are 4 modules in this course

This course aims to provide anyone who makes decisions about public health policies and programs with a clear understanding of how infectious disease transmission models work, the various types and functions, and how they can be appropriately used to make decisions. There is no requirement that students have any prior background in infectious disease models and the course does not include any equations. Anyone with a basic background in public health and infectious diseases with an interest in learning more about infectious disease models will benefit from this course. In this course, participants will review the basics of infectious disease transmission models, including comparisons to other types of predictions used in daily life and an overview of the key components of a model and modeling structure. Next, participants will delve into the types of infectious disease models: forecasting, inferential, and theoretical models. Then, participants will learn about assessing whether a model is useful, reasonable and relevant, as well as the vulnerabilities of these models. These concepts will be applied to case studies of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2014-2016 and the COVID-19 pandemic. The course will be rounded out with a review of how models inform policy decisions, including major sources of uncertainty for decision making. Learners who complete this course will have a broad view of infectious disease transmission models, how to assess the usefulness of a given model, and how these models inform policy decisions. Who should take this course? -Public health policy makers -Anyone interested in learning about how infectious disease transmission models can guide public health policy The development of this training was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics. We are grateful to Coursera for waiving enrollment fees through 2025.

Types of infectious disease models

Assessing the Value of an Infectious Disease Transmission Model

Modeling and policy decisions