The great philosopher Yogi Berra once remarked that "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future". Modelling an outbreak, and predicting its evolution, once it is over is much more comfortable than doing so while the outbreak is "live": you can take time to get the model structure correct, can narrow down the range of parameters, and if the model just does not look like the outbreak, you can change it until it does. However, in a live outbreak, you don't know what will come next, you may not really understand the situation, and you are forced to make predictions or at least projections and put your neck on the line. 

In this workshop we will look at a case study of modelling a live outbreak, parameterizing and projecting how the epidemic will unfold. Then, we'll see how well we do. It requires that you have R (ideally RStudio) installed, with the deSolve package. Or, that you are really good at programming your language of choice and won't ask for programming help.