The Scottish COVID-19 Response Consortium

who are we?

The Scottish COVID-19 Response Consortium is a consortium originally formed by three organisations

• The Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health at the University of Glasgow
• The Scottish Government's Centre of Expertise on Animal Disease Outbreaks (EPIC)
• Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland

Researchers in these organisations jointly responded to a call by the Royal Society to develop more epidemiological models of COVID-19 spread (RAPID ASSISTANCE IN MODELLING THE PANDEMIC: RAMP), in order to develop a more robust and clearer understanding of the impacts of different exit strategies from lockdown. Scientists from several other organisations across the UK and abroad have now joined the consortium to provide additional expertise in specific areas. 

Updates on our progress

31 July 2020

SCRC’s work over the last month has focused on specifying and developing our ‘Open Epidemiology’ system, which combines a data pipeline, modelling platform, visualisation and model assessment to produce outputs for policy that are traceable and reproducible.

More details on the progress of our six models and our ‘Open Epidemiology’ system can be viewed at the SCRC July Update.

We have now reached the end of the period of time of the initial RAMP consortium. Thankfully many of the volunteers working with SCRC are able to continue working with us, and we have submitted three grant applications that would enable this work to develop further. We would like to thank those that are stepping back at this stage for the contributions so far, which have been enormously valuable in getting us to where we are.

16 June 2020

The Scottish COVID-19 Response Consortium (SCRC) has continued to develop over the last few months, now including a total of over 150 members from over 30 different organisations from across the UK. Volunteers have come together from academia, government institutions and public companies, to join the teams working on the six COVID-19 models now included within the consortium.

Each model has a dedicated team of experts working to progress model development both technically (through comprehensive research software engineer support) and scientifically. As well as the six teams dedicated to individual models, the consortium also includes central teams dedicated to data management, epidemiology, inference, uncertainty quantification, visualisation and policy implications.

The consortium’s commitment to not only developing robust models but supporting them with data that is traceable and transparently sourced, has led to development of a sophisticated data pipeline. This data pipeline will allow the consortium, as a whole, to record and correlate data and model outputs at a remarkably high level of detail.

As well as developing each of the models individually, across the SCRC models are being used to cross-validate each other to ensure as much verification as possible is carried out between the models within the consortium. An important focus, currently being addressed using both fine- and regional-scale models, is the quantification of difficult to measure characteristics of the epidemic using inference from data.

Thanks to several new volunteers specialising in visualisation, SCRC is also now able to integrate visualisation at every stage of the model development and output process. Visualisation of both data inputs and model outputs is allowing modellers and software engineers to process large amounts of information more efficiently, as well as displaying model outputs clearly.

Progress continues on all fronts, with SCRC planning to have the first model outputs ready to advise policy by the end of July.