During the COVID-19 pandemic, both the promise and perils of using infectious disease transmission models to make public health policy decisions became clearer than ever. Optimal use of modeled output requires that public health policy makers be informed consumers of models, that they understand the strengths and limitations of possible approaches, and they know the right questions to ask about the vulnerabilities of the model results.

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.