RAPID: Real-time Forecasting Models for Hospitalizations of Infectious Disease in the USA

新冠肺炎揭示了传染病暴发可能在多大程度上给医疗保健系统和一般社会造成重大负担。为了在疾病高传播期支持规划和决策工作，必须了解预期的疾病负担和传播模式。该项目将为美国开发住院预测模型，该模型利用新的、高分辨率的公开数据集，即废水和基因组监测数据，以及更传统的流行病学、流动性、人口统计学、社会经济和行为数据。这些模型的设计将准确评估美国城市对当地医疗系统的预期负担，补充目前存在的州和国家层面的建模框架。一批不同的学生将领导模型开发并通过新冠肺炎流感预测中心将结果传播给疾控中心，进一步扩大已建立的学术和政府合作伙伴关系。可供公众查阅的意见书和综合预测将有助于提高社会对传染病风险的普遍了解，并有助于提高公众的科学翻译和素养。住院预测模型将利用机械建模和统计数据驱动的方法，将不同的数据输入结合到有意义的预测框架中。这项工作将包括开发新的建模技术，以进一步提高预测能力。模式的高分辨率，即社区和城市一级的性质，将填补文献和实践中的空白，迄今为止，这一空白是由州和国家一级的预测主导的。高度地方性的、更具可操作性的空间尺度将增加我们的模型在实践中的实用性，并为地方官员提供一种机制，以区分不同人口群体的危害，为决策者提供更公平和公平的政策指导。明确考虑问题背景的新型评估指标的开发将进一步增加我们模型的实用性，并为更广泛的建模社区提供一套新的性能工具。从长远来看，我们对这项研究工作的系统工程方法将有助于建立一套强大的、经过审查的工具，可用于在呼吸道病毒疾病的季节性周期和大流行期间对一系列变量进行预测。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

COVID-19 brought to light the extent to which infectious disease outbreaks can result in a significant burden on the healthcare system and societies in general. In order to support planning and decision-making efforts during periods of high disease transmission, expected disease burden and transmission patterns must be understood. This project will develop hospitalization forecasting models for the United States that exploit novel, high resolution publicly available data sets, namely waste water and genomic surveillance data, alongside more traditional epidemiological, mobility, demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral data. These models will be designed to accurately assess the expected burden on local healthcare systems for cities in the United States, complementing the state and national level modeling frameworks that currently exist. A diverse group of students will lead the model development and dissemination of the results to the CDC through the COVID-19 Forecast Hub for COVID-19 and FluSight for Influenza, further expanding upon the established academic-government partnership. The publicly accessible submissions and ensemble forecast produced will serve to both enhance societies general understanding of infectious disease risk, and help improve science translation and literacy among the general public.The hospitalization forecasting models will utilize both mechanistic modeling and statistical data-driven approaches that combine disparate data inputs into meaningful predictive frameworks. This work will include the development of novel modeling techniques to further improve predictive capabilities. The high resolution, i.e., community and city-level, nature of the models will fill a gap in both the literature and practice, which to-date is dominate by state and national level forecasts. The highly local, more actionable spatial scales will both increase the utility of our models in practice, and provide a mechanism for local officials to distinguish harm across population groups, enabling more fair and equitable policy guidance for decision makers. The development of novel evaluation metrics that explicitly consider problem context will further increase the utility of our models, and offer a new set of performance tools to the broader modeling community. In the long term, our systems engineering approach to this research effort will contribute to the establishment of a robust, vetted set of tools that can be used for forecasting across a range of variables, during both seasonal cycles of respiratory viral disease and pandemic periods.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.