The opportunities and challenges of an Ebola modeling research coordination group

A review and agenda for integrated disease models including social and behavioural factors

“…Data collection during outbreak response can be best achieved through the establishment of transdisciplinary teams working together during outbreak response to collect and analyse data. During the Ebola epidemic response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Social Science Analytics Cell established by UNICEF more proactively prioritized data collection and used integrated multidisciplinary outbreak analytics to develop and communicate real-time evidence to explain differential trends in outbreak dynamics, understand changes in health outcomes over time and measure broader health and community impacts of the outbreak 14,180,181 . These examples help to illustrate the potential of both collecting better data to inform models and developing better models to quantify the impact of social and behavioural interventions.…”