Speaker: Marta Blangiardo (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/m.blangiardo)

Title: Can we use spatio-temporal wastewater data to battle COVID-19?

Abstract: The utility of wastewater-based epidemiology as an early warning tool has been explored widely across the globe during the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, no attempt has previously been made to develop a model that predicts wastewater viral concentration at fine spatio-temporal resolutions covering an entire country, a necessary step towards using wastewater monitoring for the early detection of local outbreaks. In this talk I will first show how we can model the relationship between weekly viral concentration in wastewater at specific locations and a collection of covariates covering socio-demographics, land cover and virus-associated genomic characteristics. I will then discuss the potential for joint modelling of wastewater data and COVID-19 prevalence on a space-time resolved domain to improve the performance of public health surveillance systems.

Bio: Marta Blangiardo is a professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Imperial College London and leads the Biostatistics and Data Science theme of the MRC Centre for Environment and Health (https://environment-health.ac.uk/). She is one of the PIs of the Turing-RSS Health Data lab (https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/turing-rss-health-data-lab) and has an academic honorary contract with the UK Health Security Agency. Her main interests are related on the methodological aspects of environmental exposure estimation and on spatial and spatio-temporal models for disease mapping and for risk assessment.