Gates Package — page 959

Nanopore is now working with the Africa CDC and other partners to deploy similar advances throughout the continent.9 Another lesson is that setting up a platform similar to SCAN or the Seattle Flu Study--that is, making the test, creating the website where people can sign up, processing their samples, etc.--is only part of the challenge. It is another matter altogether to make sure that the results reflect the actual makeup of the community. Not everyone can navigate a website easily. Language barriers can get in the way. When demand for test kits is high and supplies are limited, people who can stay at home repeatedly checking a website have an advantage over essential employees who still have to go to work. Bridging these gaps has been a challenge in Seattle, and anyone who's looking to do something similar should keep them in mind. *** If I had to make a list of jobs that are both super-important and super-obscure, I'd probably put "disease modeler" near the top of the list. Or I would have before 2020. Once COVID came along, people who had been toiling in obscurity for decades found themselves thrust into the limelight. Disease modelers traffic in predictions, and during a pandemic there are few things that news reporters love more than predictions. If you can name a disease model and you're not a specialist, the one you know about is probably from either Imperial College London or the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). But there actually are dozens and possibly hundreds more models being run by academics all over the world.