Please join the Salem Center and Philippe Lemoine in person at RRH 2.238 or via Zoom here.
Address: 300 W Martin Luther King Blvd, Austin, TX 78712
Parking: You can find paid parking in the Brazos Garage, the AT&T Hotel Garage, or any other garage or street parking.
Compartmental models have been widely used during the pandemic to make projections and estimate the impact of government interventions, which in turn has informed policy by presenting decision makers with various scenarios depending on what options they choose. Philippe Lemoine argues that such models have largely failed to deliver useful inputs for decision makers, but that epidemiologists have on the whole failed to acknowledge this fact, because they did not ascribe the failure of their models to the right causes. In order to illustrate this point, after briefly presenting compartment models, he focuses on how they have been used to 1) estimate the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions and 2) make projections about new, more transmissible variants of the virus.