COVID-19 was the typical instance in which mathematical models had an impact on governmental decisions. Our group has helped launch an emergency operating centre within the Ministry of Health building in Japan, clarifying essential approaches to confronting this disease. Analyzing contact tracing data, the country has decided to take the 'cluster buster' approach. Subsequently, self restraint-based countermeasures were conducted to reduce redundant contact, and mobile data were used to monitor the essential reductions in contact frequency. Presently, models are used to ensure that hospital capacity is enough to admit COVID-19 patients.

Professor Hiroshi Nishiura is the chair at Kyoto University School of Public Health. He is cosmopolitan-minded, having worked for 10 years for different infectious disease modelling groups at Imperial College London, University of Tuebingen (Germany), University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) and the University of Hong Kong, before returning back to Japan in 2013. His research interests span the areas of statistical epidemiology of infectious diseases, epidemiological modelling and biomathematical formulation of the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases.

For further information: https://plaza.umin.ac.jp/~infepi/hnishiura.htm

Publications relating to this work:

Nishiura H, Kobayashi T, Miyama T, Suzuki A, Jung SM, Hayashi K, Kinoshita R, Yang Y, Yuan B, Akhmetzhanov AR, Linton NM. 'Estimation of the asymptomatic ratio of novel coronavirus infections (COVID-19)'. Int J Infect Dis. 2020 May;94:154-155. doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.03.020. https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30139-9/pdf

Furuse Y, Sando E, Tsuchiya N, Miyahara R, Yasuda I, Ko YK, Saito M, Morimoto K, Imamura T, Shobugawa Y, Nagata S, Jindai K, Imamura T, Sunagawa T, Suzuki M, Nishiura H, Oshitani H. 'Clusters of Coronavirus Disease in Communities, Japan', January-April 2020'. Emerg Infect Dis. 2020 Sep;26(9). doi: 10.3201/eid2609.202272. Epub 2020 Jun 10. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/9/20-2272_article

Furuse Y, K Ko Y, Saito M, Shobugawa Y, Jindai K, Saito T, Nishiura H, Sunagawa T, Suzuki M; 'Epidemiology of COVID-19 Outbreak in Japan, January-March 2020.' National Task Force for COVID-19 Outbreak in Japan. Jpn J Infect Dis. 2020 Apr 30. doi: 10.7883/yoken.JJID.2020.271. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32350228/