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  1. Jue Tao L, Dickens BSL, Yinan M, Woon Kwak C, Ching NL, Cook AR
    J R Soc Interface, 2020 07;17(168):20200340.
    PMID: 32693746 DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2020.0340
    Dengue is hyper-endemic in Singapore and Malaysia, and daily movement rates between the two countries are consistently high, allowing inference on the role of local transmission and imported dengue cases. This paper describes a custom built sparse space-time autoregressive (SSTAR) model to infer and forecast contemporaneous and future dengue transmission patterns in Singapore and 16 administrative regions within Malaysia, taking into account connectivity and geographical adjacency between regions as well as climatic factors. A modification to forecast impulse responses is developed for the case of the SSTAR and is used to simulate changes in dengue transmission in neighbouring regions following a disturbance. The results indicate that there are long-term responses of the neighbouring regions to shocks in a region. By computation of variable inclusion probabilities, we found that each region's own past counts were important to describe contemporaneous case counts. In 15 out of 16 regions, other regions case counts were important to describe contemporaneous case counts even after controlling for past local dengue transmissions and exogenous factors. Leave-one-region-out analysis using SSTAR showed that dengue transmission counts could be reconstructed for 13 of 16 regions' counts using external dengue transmissions compared to a climate only approach. Lastly, one to four week ahead forecasts from the SSTAR were more accurate than baseline univariate autoregressions.
  2. Lim JT, Dickens BSL, Chew LZX, Choo ELW, Koo JR, Aik J, et al.
    PLoS Negl Trop Dis, 2020 10;14(10):e0008719.
    PMID: 33119609 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0008719
    An estimated 105 million dengue infections occur per year across 120 countries, where traditional vector control is the primary control strategy to reduce contact between mosquito vectors and people. The ongoing sars-cov-2 pandemic has resulted in dramatic reductions in human mobility due to social distancing measures; the effects on vector-borne illnesses are not known. Here we examine the pre and post differences of dengue case counts in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, and estimate the effects of social distancing as a treatment effect whilst adjusting for temporal confounders. We found that social distancing is expected to lead to 4.32 additional cases per 100,000 individuals in Thailand per month, which equates to 170 more cases per month in the Bangkok province (95% CI: 100-242) and 2008 cases in the country as a whole (95% CI: 1170-2846). Social distancing policy estimates for Thailand were also found to be robust to model misspecification, and variable addition and omission. Conversely, no significant impact on dengue transmission was found in Singapore or Malaysia. Across country disparities in social distancing policy effects on reported dengue cases are reasoned to be driven by differences in workplace-residence structure, with an increase in transmission risk of arboviruses from social distancing primarily through heightened exposure to vectors in elevated time spent at residences, demonstrating the need to understand the effects of location on dengue transmission risk under novel population mixing conditions such as those under social distancing policies.
  3. Chow JY, Bansal S, Dickens BSL, Ma P, Hoffmann A, Cheong YL, et al.
    EBioMedicine, 2024 Dec;110:105456.
    PMID: 39615459 DOI: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2024.105456
    BACKGROUND: Dengue remains a global health challenge with limited treatment options, highlighting the need for effective vector control strategies. The introduction of Wolbachia pipientis into Aedes aegypti populations has shown success in reducing dengue transmission across global field trials. However, the spillover effectiveness of the technology on untreated areas is not well-known. This study estimates the spillover protective effectiveness (PE) of Wolbachia-mediated introgression on dengue.

    METHODS: We used the synthetic control method (SCM) under assumption of partial interference to evaluate the direct and spillover PEs of Wolbachia-mediated introgression in a long-running operational trial of the intervention in Malaysia. Synthetic controls (SCs), which comprise of a weighted sum of non-spillover controls, were constructed for each directly-treated and spillover site in the pre-intervention period to account for historical imbalances in dengue risk and risk trajectories. SCs were compared to directly/spillover-treated sites to estimate the impact of Wolbachia-introgression on dengue incidence across each site, calendar year and intervention time. Robustness checks, including visual inspections, root-mean-square error (RMSE) calculations, in-space and in-time placebo checks, and permutation tests, were used to inspect the model's ability in attributing dengue incidence reductions to the Wolbachia interventions.

    FINDINGS: The direct and spillover PEs of Wolbachia on dengue incidence were expressed as a percentage reduction of dengue incidence, or the absolute case reductions, by comparing SCs to actual intervention/spillover sites. Findings indicate a direct reduction in dengue incidence by 64.35% (95% CI: 63.50-66.71, p 

  4. Lim JT, Maung K, Tan ST, Ong SE, Lim JM, Koo JR, et al.
    PLoS Comput Biol, 2021 May;17(5):e1008959.
    PMID: 34043622 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008959
    Mass gathering events have been identified as high-risk environments for community transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Empirical estimates of their direct and spill-over effects however remain challenging to identify. In this study, we propose the use of a novel synthetic control framework to obtain causal estimates for direct and spill-over impacts of these events. The Sabah state elections in Malaysia were used as an example for our proposed methodology and we investigate the event's spatial and temporal impacts on COVID-19 transmission. Results indicate an estimated (i) 70.0% of COVID-19 case counts within Sabah post-state election were attributable to the election's direct effect; (ii) 64.4% of COVID-19 cases in the rest of Malaysia post-state election were attributable to the election's spill-over effects. Sensitivity analysis was further conducted by examining epidemiological pre-trends, surveillance efforts, varying synthetic control matching characteristics and spill-over specifications. We demonstrate that our estimates are not due to pre-existing epidemiological trends, surveillance efforts, and/or preventive policies. These estimates highlight the potential of mass gatherings in one region to spill-over into an outbreak of national scale. Relaxations of mass gathering restrictions must therefore be carefully considered, even in the context of low community transmission and enforcement of safe distancing guidelines.
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