simulating the pandemic

Nature of 13 November has a general public article on simulating the COVID pandemic as benefiting from the experience gained by climate-modelling methodology.

“…researchers didn’t appreciate how sensitive CovidSim was to small changes in its inputs, their results overestimated the extent to which a lockdown was likely to reduce deaths…”

The argument is essentially Bayesian, namely rather than using a best guess of the parameters of the model, esp. given the state of the available data (and the worse for March). When I read

“…epidemiologists should stress-test their simulations by running ‘ensemble’ models, in which thousands of versions of the model are run with a range of assumptions and inputs, to provide a spread of scenarios with different probabilities…”

it sounds completely Bayesian. Even though there is no discussion of the prior modelling or of the degree of wrongness of the epidemic model itself. The researchers at UCL who conducted the multiple simulations and the assessment of sensitivity to the 940 various parameters found that 19 of them had a strong impact, mostly

“…the length of the latent period during which an infected person has no symptoms and can’t pass the virus on; the effectiveness of social distancing; and how long after getting infected a person goes into isolation…”

but this outcome is predictable (and interesting). Mentions of Bayesian methods appear at the end of the paper:

“…the uncertainty in CovidSim inputs [uses] Bayesian statistical tools — already common in some epidemiological models of illnesses such as the livestock disease foot-and-mouth.”


“Bayesian tools are an improvement, says Tim Palmer, a climate physicist at the University of Oxford, who pioneered the use of ensemble modelling in weather forecasting.”

along with ensemble modelling, which sounds a synonym for Bayesian model averaging… (The April issue on the topic had also Bayesian aspects that were explicitely mentionned.)

2 Responses to “simulating the pandemic”

  1. Dear Xian/Christian,

    This seems a great topic for discussion in times of Covid. The literature seems to give you only partially right though, I quote, »There exist various other approaches to postprocessing ensemble forecasts, however, many of those techniques can be viewed within the framework of BMA and EMOS (Gneiting, 2014).« (

    Kind regards,

  2. Indeed, one of the models developed within the community included climate modeling researchers.

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