Fire and mouse alarm

Yesterday we finally had our workshop on infectious disease modelling in health economic evaluation. I think the day went very well and we had very interesting talks (as soon as I can, I will upload the slides on the website above, for all the speakers who can grant us permission to do so).

The morning was the most technical part (as intended), but I think everybody was able to follow the talks (which at times had lots of statistical details), because they all had some practical results and nice graphical displays.

The “industry” session was also very interesting and quite varied with different perspectives and problems being highlighted.

Then, just after the start of the final session (which had speakers from NICE and the JCVI, to present the reimbursement agencies perspective), all hell broke lose: first, the fire alarm went off, for what turned out to be basically nothing \(-\) I was trying to listen to the conversation between the UCL people and Fire Marshals trying to determine whether there really was a risk and I think I understood that they were getting really annoyed at the alarm going off for what was clearly nothing).

Then, as we resumed the session, we had another interesting surprise. Shortly after the beginning of the second talk, a little mouse (probably disturbed by all the fuss caused by the fire alarm) decided to start roaming through the lecture theatre. I thought I caught a glimpse of something moving suspiciously while I was listening to the talk, but I made nothing of it \(-\) until I saw other people looking away from the lectern and increasingly slightly disgusted… Eventually, the mouse got bored (and possibly scared) of the people and disappeared somewhere in one of the air conditioning holes. But that’s Central London for you…