Prof Tony Blakely presents "What do COVID-19 and the tobacco epidemics have in common? A need for quality modelling of intervention impacts"

Recording: https://echo360.org.au/section/7e2f36a9-ca11-476e-84b4-fb14d6391b67/public

COVID-19 keeps on evolving and changing.  Modelling has been, and will continue to be, essential for trying to plan our way through this pandemic.  

In parallel, other obstacles to better health and lesser health inequalities remain – like tobacco.

The Population Interventions Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, has been established by Professor Tony Blakely to scale up modeling of many preventive interventions – to allow comparable estimates of health impacts (health adjusted life years) and costs (health system and beyond) for 100s of interventions in Australasia and beyond.  

This presentation will focus on both the urgent COVID-19 situation, and the longer-term preventive modelling that is publicly available at COVID-19 Pandemic Trade-Offs (www.pandemictradeoffs.com), and associated research. An agent-based model is central, to estimate how infection rates respond to policies such as lockdowns, mask wearing and vaccination. This then feeds through to an integrated epidemiological and economic model to estimate health adjusted life years and costs.

Outputs that will be presented in this seminar include:
-    Modelling that underpinned Victoria’s exit from its second wave in 2020
-    Likely trajectories from now till when the current Australian vaccine roll out is completed 
-    And, importantly, what policy settings we need when we open up more fully to quarantine-free arrivals to Australian next year (a mix of how many infected we allow in, vaccine coverage we achieve, and policy settings we retain in Australia (i.e. level of ongoing suppression)).

The presentation will conclude by considering past, and future priority, modelling of the tobacco endgame, what we find, and how this might assist countries such as Australia and NZ expedite the end of the tobacco epidemic. 
 

EVENT DETAILS
Date: Tuesday 10th August 2021
Time: 1 – 2pm
Venue: via Zoom - https://uqz.zoom.us/j/87851615852

Recording:  A recording will be made available on 13th August and can be accessed here.