Among the numerous Queens' Fellows, students and alumni working to combat COVID-19 is Dr Freya Jephcott. Dr Jephcott is a Junior Research Fellow at Queens' and a Research Fellow at the University’s Disease Dynamics Unit, in the Department of Veterinary Medicine. She is currently participating in several COVID-19-related projects, including a COVID-19 surveillance platform, in collaboration with Emma Glennon and Dr Olivier Restif in the Vet School as well as a number of researchers across Europe, North America and Africa. The platform is aimed at helping public health officials working in resource-limited settings to rapidly detect potential COVID-19 outbreaks.
My research usually involves ethnographic observation, which means directly watching and documenting an outbreak response as it unfolds. This helps us to understand the factors that informed its trajectory and thus its overall effectiveness. With our larger surveillance platform project, I’m now doing more coordination and administrative work. In some ways this is nice, as I get to work closely with our research partners and funders. The drawback is that I’m not taking full advantage of the opportunity to directly observe a pandemic response unfolding.
Mounting an effective response to this pandemic will be extremely difficult because of variable information about how the disease is affecting different populations. Surveillance data informs response efforts by telling us where the disease is, who is being affected, and how well our interventions are going. Populations already well served by health systems - often groups of higher socio-economic status - tend to be captured by surveillance. Other groups, for instance rural sub-Saharan populations or minorities living in large North American cities, are just not visible in the same way. It is often only after the fact that we can estimate the damage in these populations.
A full interview with Dr Jephcott can be found on the University of Cambridge website.
If any Fellows, students, staff or alumni have news items they would like to be featured on the College website, please send them to the Communications Officer, Alice Webster.