W+n-jet predictions at the Large Hadron Collider at next-to-leading order matched with a parton shower.

For the first time, differential cross sections for the production of W bosons in conjunction with up to three jets, computed at next-to leading order in QCD and including parton shower corrections, are presented and compared to recent experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider.

A mixed-method approach to determining contact matrices in the Cox's Bazar refugee settlement.

Contact matrices are an important ingredient in age-structured epidemic models to inform the simulated spread of the disease between subgroups of the population. These matrices are generally derived using resource-intensive diary-based surveys and few exist in the Global South or tailored to vulnerable populations. In particular, no contact matrices exist for refugee settlements-locations under-served by epidemic models in general. In this paper, we present a novel, mixed-method approach for deriving contact matrices in populations, which combines a lightweight, rapidly deployable survey with an agent-based model of the population informed by census and behavioural data. We use this method to derive the first set of contact matrices for the Cox's Bazar refugee settlement in Bangladesh. To validate our approach, we apply it to the UK population and compare our derived matrices with well-known contact matrices collected using traditional methods. Our findings demonstrate that our mixed-method approach successfully addresses some of the challenges faced by traditional and agent-based approaches to deriving contact matrices. It also shows potential for implementation in resource-constrained environments. This work therefore contributes to a broader aim of developing new methods and mechanisms of data collection for modelling disease spread in refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) settlements and better serving these vulnerable communities.

Epidemiological modelling in refugee and internally displaced people settlements: challenges and ways forward.

The spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 presents many challenges to healthcare systems and infrastructures across the world, exacerbating inequalities and leaving the world's most vulnerable populations at risk. Epidemiological modelling is vital to guiding evidence-informed or data-driven decision making. In forced displacement contexts, and in particular refugee and internally displaced people (IDP) settlements, it meets several challenges including data availability and quality, the applicability of existing models to those contexts, the accurate modelling of cultural differences or specificities of those operational settings, the communication of results and uncertainties, as well as the alignment of strategic goals between diverse partners in complex situations. In this paper, we systematically review the limited epidemiological modelling work applied to refugee and IDP settlements so far, and discuss challenges and identify lessons learnt from the process. With the likelihood of disease outbreaks expected to increase in the future as more people are displaced due to conflict and climate change, we call for the development of more approaches and models specifically designed to include the unique features and populations of refugee and IDP settlements. To strengthen collaboration between the modelling and the humanitarian public health communities, we propose a roadmap to encourage the development of systems and frameworks to share needs, build tools and coordinate responses in an efficient and scalable manner, both for this pandemic and for future outbreaks.

June: open-source individual-based epidemiology simulation.

We introduce June, an open-source framework for the detailed simulation of epidemics on the basis of social interactions in a virtual population constructed from geographically granular census data, reflecting age, sex, ethnicity and socio-economic indicators. Interactions between individuals are modelled in groups of various sizes and properties, such as households, schools and workplaces, and other social activities using social mixing matrices. June provides a suite of flexible parametrizations that describe infectious diseases, how they are transmitted and affect contaminated individuals. In this paper, we apply June to the specific case of modelling the spread of COVID-19 in England. We discuss the quality of initial model outputs which reproduce reported hospital admission and mortality statistics at national and regional levels as well as by age strata.