During the Corona pandemic, scientists at the IMISE Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology at Leipzig University’s Faculty of Medicine modeled the development of case and death rates. Now the team headed by Professor Markus Scholz has been given the go-ahead for a new project on the modeling of infectious diseases.

“We plan to develop data-driven short-term models as well as mechanistic long-term models to predict patient admissions at various levels of care for the three respiratory infections COVID-19, influenza, and pneumococcal pneumonia. The models will be used to advise government and other decision-makers regarding hospital resource planning,” explained Professor Scholz, who heads the PROGNOSIS Consortium. PROGNOSIS was set up by five institutions with expertise in biostatistics, bioinformatics, epidemiology, health research, infectious diseases and economics. It’s been granted funding of €1.6 million until 2025 by the BMBF Ministry of Education and Research. The COVID-19 pandemic showed that healthcare resources can be overwhelmed, even in highly developed countries. As well as leading to inadequate care for patients, this also impacts the efficiency of the healthcare system as a whole, with prevention and screening programs being curtailed and important surgery delayed. For this reason, it’s important to develop ways of forecasting the impact on the health service in a pandemic,” explained Professor Scholz.

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