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Michelle Kendall

@mishkendall.bsky.social
636 followers 214 following 37 posts

Infectious disease epidemiologist at Oxford PSI. Working on vaccine trials for CEPI priority pathogens and Digital Contact Tracing, previously NHS COVID-19 app. michellekendall.github.io

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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Join us this September for our first workshop on Digital Pandemic Preparedness! Working towards ensuring digital tools are ready for global health emergencies. 📍 Oxford Martin School 🗓️ 21-23 September 2026 🙋‍♀️ Registration: £150 to cover catering ➡️ Guest speakers and registration link: bit.ly/44J96bq
Poster advertising the Digital Pandemic Preparedness multi-disciplinary workshop, 21-23 September 2026 in Oxford. The background image is a stylised globe with glowing dots and lines symbolising digital communications.The image is of a quote: "Digital tools can significantly mitigate health risks and socio-economic harms, but timely deployment requires trusted governance, fully-tested, interoperable tooling and established plans for Public Health integration."
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James Hay @jameshay.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Are you a computational immunologist or bioinformatician interested in impactful vaccine research? We're hiring a postdoc to join @psioxford.bsky.social work in vaccine immunology and evaluation, working on the ChAdOx1 Nipah vaccine. Please get in touch! my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...
my.corehr.com
Job Details
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Six years since the inception of Digital Contact Tracing! We've shown that privacy-preserving DCT could play a key, low-cost role in mitigating future outbreaks whilst simultaneously gathering valuable epi insights in real time. michellekendall.github.io/2026/03/05/d...
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Excellent detail on the latest “super flu” situation here, featuring @jameshay.bsky.social from Oxford Uni’s PSI @psioxford.bsky.social Spoiler: it’s bad but “super” is a bit of a stretch www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...
bbc.co.uk
BBC Radio 4 - More or Less, Do we really have ‘superflu’?
The NHS is warning of an unprecedented flu season - we check.
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Dr Edward Hill @edmhill.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
1/ Seasonal influenza summary from latest @ukhsa.bsky.social surveillance report. #IDSky #EpiSky 🧪 🗓️ Based on data up to week 49 2025 (01-07 Dec 2025) 📊 Increases in activity measured by multiple indicators. Influenza circulating at medium levels in England. Report 🔗: www.gov.uk/government/s...
gov.uk
National flu and COVID-19 surveillance report: 11 December 2025 (week 50)
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James Hay @jameshay.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
H3N2 preprint: there are concerns of a severe incoming influenza season due to the drifted H3N2 K clade. We at @psioxford.bsky.social analysed epi data and ran scenario models to see what we could discern about K clade transmission dynamics: zenodo.org/records/1770.... (1/18)
zenodo.org
Evaluation of the epidemiological outlook of the influenza A/H3N2 clade K in England during the 2025-26 season
Key findings England is currently experiencing a high growth rate of infections caused by the influenza A/H3N2 K clade. Antigenic change from the previously dominant clade, a rapid selective sweep evi...
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
If you've heard murmurings about the new H3N2 flu 🦠 strain you may appreciate this excellent work by @jameshay.bsky.social & team, putting the available data for England in context of previous seasons and mapping out likely ways it could play out over the winter. 📄 zenodo.org/records/1770...
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UK Health Security Agency @ukhsa.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
🆕 #UKHSAVirusWatch: The latest flu, COVID-19 & RSV data from our weekly winter surveillance report. 🟢 Flu has continued to increase - especially in children and young adults - in what has been an unusually early start to the influenza season. Read the full report below. 🔎 bit.ly/47shfmB
Graph showing positive tests for flu, COVID-19 and RSVGraph showing positive tests by age for fluVirusWatch infographicDr Jamie Lopez Bernal, Consultant Epidemiologist at UKHSA, said:
Flu continues to increase among younger people despite the school half-term break. We expect the holidays gave flu a ‘firebreak’ and dampened the spread, but we do now expect to see further increases as people return to school and work.
With this upward trend continuing, it’s more important than ever that those eligible for a free flu vaccine come forward.
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UK Health Security Agency @ukhsa.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
🆕 #UKHSAVirusWatch: The latest flu, COVID-19 and RSV data from our weekly winter surveillance report. Flu has increased, particularly in children, and is now above baseline levels. This is an unusually early start to the influenza season Find the full report here: bit.ly/3Lh27zJ
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Adam Kucharski @adamjkucharski.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Want to build an interactive dashboard so others can explore epidemic scenarios? For COVID, @ngdavies.bsky.social spearheaded a great drag-and-drop approach, which made use of the JavaScript-based nature of RShiny... 1/
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
I’m delighted to share that I’ve just started work on this @cepi.net project in Christophe Fraser’s group @christophraser.bsky.social cepi.net//landmark-af...
cepi.net
Landmark African-led research to map the extent of Rift Valley fever impact | CEPI
The studies will help scientists figure out if trials assessing the efficacy of Rift Valley fever vaccines are possible.
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Christophe Fraser's Group @christophraser.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
New paper: we argue that a promising approach for studying mpox vaccine effectiveness in Central Africa to incorporate mpox vaccination + testing data into existing cohort studies, especially those for HIV/STIs. www.thelancet.com/journals/ebi...
thelancet.com
Clade I mpox vaccination: strategies for deployment and evaluation
Clade I mpox continues to spread in Central Africa with no sign of abating,1 however very few doses of vaccine have been deployed. Mpox vaccination strategies using either of the licenced vaccines, MV...
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
"I have long felt that the risks of sharing your data - the possibility that your information will fall into the hands of people who are up to no good - are given far more prominence that the potential rewards in the form of advances in medicine."
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Rory Cellan-Jones @rorycj.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
open.substack.com/pub/rorycell... This post about the importance of knowing the difference between truth tellers and myth makers in healthcare has already attracted a comment from a member of the “plandemic” community which nicely makes my point about the dangers of disinformation
open.substack.com
The Truth About the Covid App
Myths about its cost and effectiveness stop us learning lessons
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Sonja Lehtinen @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
New paper: long-term trends in antibiotic resistance show signs of stabilisation (thread). journals.plos.org/plospathogen...
journals.plos.org
The evolution of antibiotic resistance in Europe, 1998–2019
Author summary Antibiotic resistance is an important public health threat: resistant infections are currently associated with 5 million deaths per year globally. This burden may increase further in th...
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
Right? Maybe there are good reasons for the scheduling, and only a small minority of us working part/flexi hours and not using after school clubs. But if we had been considered even for a moment I would expect them to at least offer a recording, and I can’t see one mentioned…
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
🪧 What do we want? 🪧 Help balancing work and family life! 🪧 When do we want it? 🪧 School pick-up time!
Screenshot of details for a Royal Statistical Society event, titled "Balancing the Equation: Work, Family, and Career Growth in Statistics and Data Science". It is scheduled for Monday 3 March from 3 to 4pm.
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
@psioxford.bsky.social are hosting the International Pandemic Sciences Conference on 30 June – 1 July 2025 in Oxford and online, theme 'Getting ahead of the curve' 📈 Visit the website now to: ➡️ Register to attend ➡️ Submit an abstract www.psi.ox.ac.uk/conference25 #episky #IDsky
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
Interesting thread about calculating the reproduction number and reflecting on its utility
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Christophe Fraser's Group @christophraser.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Hinch & Panovska‑Griffiths et al, Nature Sci Rep: we quantified how variable mpox case ascertainment delays over time in the UK distorted the relationship between growing case counts and the true epidemic growth www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Quantification of the time-varying epidemic growth rate and of the delays between symptom onset and presenting to healthcare for the mpox epidemic in the UK in 2022 - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Quantification of the time-varying epidemic growth rate and of the delays between symptom onset and presenting to healthcare for the mpox epidemic in the UK in 2022
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Christophe Fraser's Group @christophraser.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Kendall & Ferretti et al, Science: we showed anonymised data from app-based contact tracing enables analytics for epidemic monitoring that is virtually real-time, high-resolution & national scale. Nice Science mag front cover 👀 (Remember outdoors safer than indoors!) 045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/monitoring
Front cover of Science Magazine shows a large crowd of people watching a football match, with the title TRANSMISSION EVENT: Digital contact tracing for COVID-19Example of app-based epidemic monitoring in England during the Euro 2020 football tournament. A graph shows how the daily number of close contact events and transmission events detected by the NHS COVID-19 app in England had sharp and increasing peaks on days of England football matches.
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Christophe Fraser's Group @christophraser.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
👋 Hello World! Some of our papers this year ICYMI Ferretti & Wymant et al, Nature: using 7 million digitally recorded COVID exposures, we found app-based contact tracing successfully measured the actual risk of transmission and we decomposed contributors to risk 045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/risk_measure...
Image shows how the probability of reported infection with SARS-CoV-2 among people notified by the NHS COVID-19 App increases with the risk score calculated by the app.
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Moritz Kraemer @mugkraemer.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Another opportunity to come work @universityofoxford.bsky.social on the @oxmartinschool.bsky.social project on *Digital Pandemic Preparedness* together with Profs. Christl Donnelly, Christophe Fraser, Melinda Mills, Michael Parker, Luca Ferretti and me. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...
oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk
Digital Pandemic Preparedness
This programme will develop a blueprint for digital health systems that can be deployed during pandemics, create a funding model for implementation, and…
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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 18/11/2024
New article by me & Lucas at Our World in Data! The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have killed more than 25 million people; it caused grief & suffering among their loved ones, impacted people's health worldwide & disrupted work & lifestyles. We look back on the pandemic with 17 charts:
ourworldindata.org
17 key charts to understand the COVID-19 pandemic
The pandemic has resulted in over twenty million deaths. In this article, we review the key insights from global data on COVID-19.
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
Really handy! Thanks!
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Shout out to everyone who worked on the NHS COVID-19 app, particularly my amazing academic collaborators Christophe Fraser, @chriswymant.bsky.social, Luca Ferretti, @daphnetsallis.bsky.social, @alicele.bsky.social and Xavier Didelot who all played a central role in the work I've described.
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
2. Motivations for pandemic preparedness. Digital contact tracing apps could: a. play a key, low-cost role in mitigating future outbreaks. b. gather valuable insights in real time, helping to evaluate and fine-tune our choices of public health interventions (towards minimising negative impacts).
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
To round up. Why is all this important? 1. Retrospective insights: a. we've quantified the epidemiological effectiveness of digital contact tracing. b. we've found out more about COVID-19: how and when it spread during the years the app was active, in lots of detail.
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Further results and more details are of course available at the links provided, with discussion of subtleties, limitations etc. to unpack this big list of statements. For easy-read versions with just a bit more detail, you may prefer the corresponding blog posts: michellekendall.github.io/blog/
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Christmas and the Euros were associated with big increases in spread, driven by synchronised (likely inter-generational) meet-ups across England and/or Wales. Excess transmissions on Euro match days accounted for 29% of all app-recorded transmissions during the month-long tournament scim.ag/86t
Science magazine cover showing England football fans in Wembley stadium, titled "Transmission Event: Digital contact tracing for COVID-19"Figure showing contacts and transmissions associated with England match days during the Euros
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Plus the data captured fine-grained insights into the drivers of transmission, including the effects of day-of-the-week, setting (longer vs more fleeting contact), and geographical region.
Figure showing relative daily fractions of contacts which were from households, recurring, single day or fleeting encounters, and the corresponding proportions of transmissions. Christmas Day stands out as having many more household contacts and fewer fleeting contacts than usual.
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Analysis of app data provided a leading indicator of the reproduction number R, available at least 5 days earlier than other estimates. This provided valuable situational awareness for policy makers.
Figure showing various estimators of the reproduction number R over the course of the epidemic
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Finally, app data provided near real-time insights into the drivers of the epidemic. We could see if a wave was driven by an increase in contact rates or infectiousness. doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Figure showing the contributions of (a) contact rates and (b) probability of reported infection to (c) the reproduction number.
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
"Whereas most exposures were short (median 0.7 h, interquartile range 0.4–1.6), transmissions typically resulted from exposures lasting between 1 h and several days (median 6 h, interquartile range 1.4–28). Households accounted for about 6% of contacts but 40% of transmissions."
Figure showing how short, intermediate and long exposures all contribute to COVID transmissionFigure caption, providing full details
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
By analysing 7 million contacts captured by the app, we (a) concluded the app was good at measuring "riskiness" of contact, and (b) quantified for the first time the "riskiness" of contacts according to distance and duration. doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Figure showing app risk scores and duration of contact correlating with probability of infection, both overall and disaggregated by month of the year
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
But that's not all! The huge user base and near-instant data collection from the NHS COVID-19 app meant that we could gain some epidemiological insights that had never before been possible 👀
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
App usage declined as vaccines (happily!) did most of the life-saving work, but it continued to help reduce pressure on the NHS. Each week in 2022, 30-60% of nationally-registered positive tests were reported via the app and 1000s of contacts were traced. bdi-pathogens.shinyapps.io/NHS-COVID-19...
Weekly measure of the percentage of cases in England and Wales from the government dashboard which were reported through the appWeekly totals of positive tests reported through the app and corresponding contact tracing alerts received
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Impressive achievements for a new technology built rapidly during a pandemic by teams who had largely never met before 🏆 Frequent, rapid updates were required to maintain it in line with national policy changes 💪👏 And of course huge thanks to the >18 million users who made it such a success ✨🙏
Graphs showing app uptake (a) as a timeseries across the year, (b) as a map, varying across authorities in England and Wales
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
The app's popularity and accuracy made it effective: a user getting an alert was always at least twice as likely to be infected as a person randomly selected from the population. At its peak, a notified app user was 77 (CI 54, 106) times more likely to be infected than a not-notified app user.
Figure showing the timeseries of (a) probability of testing positive when notified by the app relative to the general population, (b) odds for testing positive in recently notified app users relative to not-recently-notified app users
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Later, we performed an analysis of the app's first year. Central estimates: it averted 1 million cases, 44k hospitalisations and 10k deaths. Plenty of uncertainty in the estimates owing to the privacy-preserving, minimal data collection. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Graphs showing cumulative numbers of cases, hospitalisations and deaths averted in the app's first year.
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Approximately one case was averted for each case consenting to notification of their contacts. We showed that for every percentage point increase in app uptake, the number of cases could be reduced by 0.8% (using modelling) or 2.3% (using statistical analysis).
Figure showing that app use and total number of cases averted were positively correlated.
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
We found that over its first three months of operation the NHS COVID-19 app reduced the number of cases by something in the region of 14% or 25%, depending on the method of attribution. doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Figure showing geographical variability of app uptake and cases of COVID-19. There is some visual association between Lower Tier Local Authorities with higher app uptake and lower numbers of cases.
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
The NHS COVID-19 app for England and Wales was launched in September 2020. It featured local area info, QR check-ins for public venues, symptom checker, access to testing and results, and Bluetooth-based contact tracing. Within days there were >10 million users.
Picture of hand holding smartphone with the NHS COVID-19 app loaded
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
A contact tracing app was launched in May 2020 on the Isle of Wight, England. We performed a preliminary analysis of its effectiveness. There was limited data available, but it looked promising. doi.org/10.1016/S258...
Graphs showing how the epidemic on the Isle of Wight improved in comparison to 'similar' areas after the introduction of Test and Trace on the island
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
In many countries, this was the motivation for developing digital contact tracing. An Agent-Based Model called OpenABM-Covid19 helped refine details of how tracing could/should work by modelling realistic household sizes, age-based interactions, smartphone ownership etc. doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Figure showing how the model allows interactions to vary by setting and by age
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
It began in Christophe Fraser's group in Oxford, Feb/Mar 2020. Since ~half of all COVID-19 infections were from people without symptoms (including pre- and asymptomatic), we showed that contact tracing would need to be quick and scalable to be effective. Full details: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Diagram showing how speeding up contact tracing increases its effectiveness for COVID-19
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
So here goes: a Very Brief History of the NHS COVID-19 app which made waves in the world of epidemiology. Not the nasty exponential-growth kind of waves, in fact it helped squash those! But advances in low-cost public health intervention and lessons for future pandemic preparedness 💪 #IDSky #EpiSky
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
I spent most of the last few years working on digital contact tracing, first at the Big Data Institute at @universityofoxford.bsky.social then @warwickstats.bsky.social, working closely with the UK Health Security Agency 📱 Then a year on maternity leave 👶 Both roles were an absolute privilege!
Advertisement for the NHS COVID-19 app. It says "Protect your loved ones. Get the app."
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Really enjoying the big migration of #IDSky and #EpiSky communities here 👋 Looking forward to having a daily feed of excellent science-y updates and discussions once again. I think it'll be helpful to populate my profile with a quick round-up of my research, and I encourage others to do the same.
media.tenor.com
a group of penguins are walking in a line with national geographic written on the bottom of the screen
Alt: A group of penguins migrating
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Michelle Kendall @mishkendall.bsky.social · 21/10/2024
Thanks! It's good to be back, and Bluesky is looking promising so far 🤞
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