Nowcasting norovirus cases (shameless self plug)

My team at UKHSA’s paper on nowcasting norovirus methods has now been published here:

An application of nowcasting methods: Cases of norovirus during the winter 2023/2024 in England | PLOS Computational Biology

What we didn’t put in the paper but going through this process highlighted to me:

  • nowcasting of routine surveillance has related but quite different challenges to in an outbreak / breakthrough epidemic situation
  • working out the right baseline model for a nowcast was tricky and I wasn’t super satisfied with where we ended up
  • nowcast > truncate and forecast. I think this is quite an obvious result, but I hadn’t seen it explicitly - this is partly so we have an evidence base within our agency.
  • leading indicators are hard
  • is there an agreed / sensible way for setting the max delay D?

The motivation for this work which we touch on is to improve norovirus surveillance, particularly in the event of a strain replacement event. This new strain actually arrived during the peer review process, so we have been getting lots of use out of this modelling over winter 2024/25:

NHS England » Record number of norovirus patients in hospital

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At a glance, this looks really interesting/good stuff.

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