Research from the Telethon Kids Institute aims to gather data to model how the COVID-19 virus could spread through high-risk populations.
A team of researchers, led by Associate Professor Nick Golding, from the Telethon Kids Institute and Curtin University, is developing a project that seeks to understand how COVD-19 could spread within high-risk populations across WA. The project also aims to calculate the risk of “spill-over” infections to other groups.
The project, entitled “Quantifying contact networks for COVID-19 outbreak preparedness” is funded through the WA Future Health Research and Innovation Fund program, and is part of a series of projects tackling different aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“One of the big unknowns with this virus at the moment is around which groups of people it gets into and how quickly they spread it to one another, and that’s shaped by lots of factors – where they work, what they do during the day, the size of their households and how much contact they have with other people,” Dr Golding said in a press release.
About this project
The project will conduct surveys in multiple population groups across WA, gathering information about their everyday life, behaviour, lifestyle and customs.
“One of the big unknowns with this virus at the moment is around which groups of people it gets into and how quickly they spread it to one another, and that’s shaped by lots of factors – where they work, what they do during the day, the size of their households and how much contact they have with other people,” Dr Golding said.
This new project aims to gather data from a representative sample of the WA population, but also focusing on high-risk groups, such as people in aged care facilities and migrant communities.
“We have designed the survey, which took a little time as we needed to make sure the questions were worded in such a way as to capture the diversity of the WA population – especially members of (culturally and linguistically diverse) CALD communities – in a respectful way,” Dr Golding told Medical Forum.
Why this project matters
The results of this study will provide real-world data about key population characteristics that have a direct influence on how the COVID-19 virus can spread across WA. So far, WA has been lucky, in that we have not experienced a full-blown outbreak. But this could change at any time.
“With COVID-19 arriving in WA among overseas arrivals, there’s a constant threat of an outbreak starting in WA. So far, all our outbreaks have been quickly detected and brought under control, but if an outbreak makes it past that first line of defence, it could rapidly spread through WA’s population,” Dr Golding told Medical Forum.
“This study would let us understand how quickly it might spread from settings like quarantine hotels into our most vulnerable populations like residential aged care facilities and migrant communities,” he added.
With this information at hand, policy makers, health care providers and other stakeholders can make better decisions on how to prioritise resources such as diagnostic tests or how to implement effective lockdown strategies.
“If we can understand contact rates between people in different population groups – e.g. between quarantine workers and aged care workers – we can understand how likely it is for the virus to jump between those populations,” Dr Golding explained.
“For example, in the event of an outbreak where all the known cases quarantine workers, or members of a particular cultural community, we would be able to calculate the chance that the virus will (or has already) spread to each of the other key populations, communities, and workplaces,” he added.
This approach, being based on a mathematical model, would be much faster than the contract tracing currently used to track down potentially infected people or high-risk sites. “That will let the WA Department of Health rapidly tailor its response in order to bring the outbreak under control,” Dr Golding said.
In the future, Dr Golding plans to combine data from his project with information about vaccine update among members of different communities, workplaces and regions across Australia.
“That will let us work out where COVID-19 would still be able to spread in Australia, and the risk that transmission in these poorly-vaccinated populations poses to our most vulnerable people. By keeping an eye on those, we can advise the WA and Australian governments on where to prioritise vaccine information campaigns, and when it might be safe to reopen the borders,” Dr Golding explained.