What I do as a modeller is try to work to synthesise available evidence about uncertain and unknown events and help support best decisions when the best evidence or experience may not always be available. So, I have the easy task of telling you what happens next. Regrettably, I don’t own a crystal ball, but I do have a strategic framework for thinking about these sorts of things.

We need to reflect that our past with COVID is relatively short. It feels like five minutes and forever, simultaneously, but it’s really only two years. And before COVID came along, I spent 15 years working on influenza pandemics. And despite more than 100 years of influenza pandemics, we’re still asking a lot of the same questions, and we still don’t have a universal influenza vaccine.