[5] In 2020, from the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the Jameel Institute began publishing regular reports with results of mathematical modelling of the spread of the virus.
[12] On 16 March 2020, the Jameel Institute—together with the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling and the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis (MRC GIDA)—published "Report 9: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand", with a focus on the UK and the US.
The report found: Two fundamental strategies are possible: (a) mitigation, which focuses on slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread – reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection, and (b) suppression, which aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels and maintaining that situation indefinitely.
We show that in the UK and US context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members.
We show that intermittent social distancing – triggered by trends in disease surveillance – may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound.
[14][8][10][9] To provide education about the pandemic, the Jameel Institute launched a free massive open online course on Coursera called "Science Matters: Let's Talk About COVID-19".