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Early in the covid-19 epidemic the Royal Society began the Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic (RAMP) initiative to bring together epidemiological modelling and supporting expertise to provide advice to government. This led to the formation of the Scottish Covid Response Consortium (SCRC) comprising members from over 30 organisations in academia and the private sector, with skills spanning epidemiology, software engineering, data management, policy / media engagement and visualisation. SCRC has produced multiple high quality pieces of epidemiological modelling software in a variety of programming languages, and a data pipeline system for rapid, reproducible outputs.
The University of Sheffield contributed an RSE to provide software engineering leadership on the Simple Network Sim epidemiological modelling software. This entailed collaborating with the epidemiological modelling lead and co-ordinating the efforts of software engineers and data scientists (largely volunteered by the Man Group) using an Agile project management approach. The work was carried out against the background of media coverage of government policy informed by imperfect research software, so a key part of what we did was to help define and ensure software quality. This resulted in the development of an epidemiological modelling software checklist.
Whilst of limited direct input to government policy, SCRC has set a new standard for open epidemiological modelling, which will, by example, drive future policy-informing research to be more open and reproducible. This gives organisations the technical and scientific foundation to behave in a trustworthy way when using evidence from epidemiological models.