From digital contact tracing to epidemic intelligence: lessons from the NHS COVID-19 App

ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital contact tracing apps were deployed to interrupt transmission, but in doing so they generated large-scale exposure and analytics data with value well beyond that purpose. In this talk, I will give an overview of what the National Health Service (NHS) COVID-19 App’s data enabled – from evaluating its epidemiological impact, to measuring transmission risk from millions of recorded contacts and monitoring the epidemic in near real time. I will then focus on epidemic monitoring – how indicators of epidemic dynamics were derived from app data, what they revealed, and their limitations. I will close with ongoing work building on these methods.

SHORT BIO
Daphne Tsallis is a data scientist in infectious disease epidemiology, with a background in bioengineering and machine learning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she worked on the Modelling & Analytics team of the NHS COVID-19 App in England and Wales, producing epidemiological analyses that informed the UK’s national response. She currently collaborates with the Fraser Pathogen Dynamics group at the University of Oxford on follow-up research using NHS COVID-19 App data, and from December joins the group as a researcher on a project on digital pandemic preparedness.