Seminar by Dr. Kathy LEUNG from Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong

Global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have largely been suboptimal due to significant underdevelopment of infrastructure, human capital, and analytics in pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPR). In particular, epidemic nowcasting has been universally challenging because it requires distilling informative or actionable insights from a diverse range of real-world data which are often biased. Misinterpretation, misrepresentation, or otherwise misuse of these nowcasts will fuel infodemics, as we have learned to our detriment during the COVID-19 pandemic. I will discuss some lessons learned from COVID-19 and how we can strengthen pandemic PPR in Hong Kong.

Dr. Kathy Leung is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong, from which she obtained her MPhil and PhD. She is interested in mathematical modelling of a wide range of diseases such as influenza, MERS, COVID-19, hand-foot-and-mouth disease, HPV, cervical cancer, colorectal cancer, and breast cancer. She also conducts epidemiological and economic evaluations of disease intervention strategies, such as HMFD vaccination, public health and social measures against COVID-19, and risk-based breast cancer screening. Leveraged on the latest development of data science, she also uses machine learning to interpret SARS-CoV-2 genomic data and participates in the development of tools to tackle misinformation about COVID-19 vaccination with natural language processing.

Dr. Leung is a member of HKU’s COVID-19 Response Team and has contributed to the earliest studies about COVID-19 epidemiology.