What is it about?
The ethics of public health should inform the design of mathematical and computational models that are used to guide policy during infectious disease interventions. We draw on experiences from the COVID-19 epidemic to present a perspective on how this can be achieved.
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Why is it important?
Designing public health interventions during infectious disease outbreaks is full of ethical trade-offs between competing values. Frameworks of public health ethics provide a means of understanding these trade-offs, but computational models used to help design interventions do not incorporate such frameworks. This is mostly because modelers and ethicists come from different disciplinary communities and rarely interact. The paper advocates for more communication and collaboration between ethicists and modelers and lays a foundation for practical steps towards ethically-aware modelling to support infectious disease interventions.
Perspectives
For me, this piece represents an outline of the type of work I'd like to be involved in for the foreseeable future of my research. The active debate between authors that went on during the evolution of the manuscript was a joy to participate in. I think the ideas expressed in the piece can be the basis for a new type of "ethically aware" modelling practice that can recognize the human costs which are currently only implicit in standard modeling approaches.
Cameron Zachreson
University of Melbourne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ethical frameworks should be applied to computational modelling of infectious disease interventions, PLoS Computational Biology, March 2024, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011933.
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