28. A tale of two viruses
Contributed abstract in session TA-4: Epidemiology and Prevention, stream Regular talks.
Tuesday, 9:00-10:30Room: Room S3
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Sally Brailsford
|
| Southampton Business School, University of Southampton |
Abstract
This talk reflects on the role of OR with respect to two different viruses, HIV and COVID-19. In both cases, the emergence of a new disease with high public visibility (and associated government funding) stimulated a significant modelling effort in the OR community. However, in a Web of Science search of the literature (limited to the category ‘Operations Research Management Science’ and excluding authors based outside Europe), the string ‘HIV not COVID’ returned 63 hits since 1988 whereas the string ‘COVID not HIV’ returned 640 hits since 2020. Expressed in terms of papers per year, this gives a ratio of 1.7 for HIV/AIDS and 128 for COVID-19. Is this huge disparity merely due to the expansion in the numbers of new journals since 2010, combined with increasing pressure on academics to ‘publish or perish’, or is it related to the diseases themselves? Certainly, AIDS did not turn out to be a global pandemic on the scale of COVID-19, although in the early years no treatment was available and epidemiologists were extremely concerned that the virus might spread into the general population. A more encouraging hypothesis is that since 2000 OR has become a recognised and valued discipline in the field of infectious disease modelling, with a vibrant research community, since OR can address practical problems of resource allocation and logistics in a way that mathematical epidemiology cannot.
Keywords
- Epidemiology and disease modelling
Status: accepted
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