Anne Cori
Imperial College statistician who co-led the 16 May 2026 expert Q&A on the Bundibugyo PHEIC.
Last refreshed: 17 May 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
If Bundibugyo ran undetected for months, what does that mean for the case count?
Timeline for Anne Cori
Co-assessed outbreak undetection window and Bundibugyo CFR at 30 to 40 per cent
Pandemics and Biosecurity: Ituri outbreak ran undetected for weeks- How long had the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak been running before WHO found out?
- Imperial College London's expert panel, including Anne Cori and Neil Ferguson, assessed on 16 May 2026 that the outbreak had likely spread undetected for several weeks or months before WHO received its first signal on 5 May. Provincial health authorities recorded haemorrhagic-fever deaths in April, at least four weeks earlier.Source: Imperial College London
- What is EpiEstim and why does it matter for outbreak response?
- EpiEstim is a statistical software package developed at Imperial College London for estimating the effective reproduction number (Rt) in real time during an outbreak, accounting for underreporting and uncertain serial intervals. It became standard across WHO, CDC and national health agencies during COVID-19 and is used for every major outbreak requiring rapid transmission estimation.
- Why is the Bundibugyo case-fatality rate hard to calculate early in the outbreak?
- With only 20 of 246 suspected cases tested as of the WHO PHEIC declaration, the denominator is deeply uncertain. Statistical methods that correct for underreporting and right-censoring of deaths are required to produce a credible CFR estimate — this is precisely Anne Cori's research domain. Imperial's panel estimated 30 to 40 per cent, but acknowledged the early data limits.Source: Imperial College London
Background
Anne Cori is a Reader in Statistical Epidemiology at Imperial College London's MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, the research unit that has provided real-time modelling and epidemiological analysis for every major outbreak since Ebola West Africa 2014. On Sunday 16 May 2026, she co-led an eight-person expert Q&A published by Imperial's School of Public Health assessing the newly declared Bundibugyo PHEIC — the panel's central finding was that the outbreak had "likely gone undetected and spread for several weeks or months" before WHO received any signal on 5 May.
Cori's primary research focus is epidemic curve reconstruction and transmission estimation under conditions of imperfect surveillance — precisely the methodological challenge the Ituri outbreak presents. She is a co-developer of the EpiEstim software package, a widely used tool for real-time effective reproduction number estimation that became standard across public health agencies during COVID-19. Her work sits at the intersection of Bayesian inference, underreporting correction, and the statistical challenge of estimating case-fatality rates when the denominator is unknown — all directly applicable to Bundibugyo, where 246 suspected cases and only 20 tested samples define the uncertainty space.
The Imperial panel's assessment that the outbreak ran undetected for weeks converts the nine-day signal-to-confirmation lag from a laboratory turnaround story into a structural surveillance-gap story. Cori and Ferguson's panel placed the undetected transmission window at "several weeks or months", with provincial health authorities recording haemorrhagic-fever deaths in Djugu and Irumu as early as April — four-plus weeks before WHO's 5 May signal.