School of Mathematics

Academics from the School of Maths are taking part in a scientific endeavour, DECOVID.

Ruth King (co-deputy team lead), Nicolò Margaritella, Michael Allerhand and Gail Robertson from the School of Mathematics are taking part in a COVID related scientific endeavour. This UoE team is composed of 13 members and includes Catalina Vellejos (the UoE Team Leader; IGMM) and Chris Williams (co-deputy team lead; School of Informatics). The team has expertise spanning statistics, machine learning and medicine.

The endeavour, DECOVID, is a research database and a scientific undertaking with founding partners, including the Alan Turing Institute and two NHS Foundation Trusts. The project involves analysing electronic health data in order to answer clinically important questions about how best to care for patients who are at risk of, are suspected, or confirmed, to have COVID-19. DECOVID also hopes to understand the impact of the pandemic on non-COVID-19 patients and aims to ensure that a wide range of hospitals will contribute to its work so that new insights are generalizable across the UK and beyond.

The analytical teams will work on questions that are provided by the clinical community with the aim of leading to improved patient care. Questions can also be posed by researchers, clinicians and members of the public. All questions posed will be prioritised by a team of senior clinical experts. De-identifiable data will be used by the analytical teams to investigate the questions and try to find an answer which will then be discussed by the clinical community. Patients and the public are at the heart of these processes and sit on all senior decision-making committees and review how the data is used.

More information about the work being conducted can be found here: https://www.decovid.org/