Seminar: Louis Du Plessis

Insights into infectious disease dynamics across time and space with phylogenetics and phylodynamics

Many viruses evolve fast enough to accumulate significant genetic diversity over the course of an outbreak, allowing us to build trees that represent the evolutionary history of virus lineages. Phylodynamic models allow us to infer the epidemiological dynamics behind an outbreak, such as rates of spread within and between locations. Using examples from the COVID-19 pandemic I show how we can combine genetic data with case and mobility data to gain a deeper understanding of an outbreak. I also show how the types of insights we can gain change as we sequence more genomes over longer periods of time.