UT COVID-19 modeling group continues research, prepares for next pandemic
AUSTIN (KXAN) — During the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak, researchers at the University of Texas followed every positive case, took that data and gave a picture of the spread to help hospitals prepare for an increase in patients.
The UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium is now going nationwide with a new name — epiENGAGE. UT is partnering with multiple university and health organizations across the nation to start preparing for the next pandemic, UT professor Lauren Ancel Meyers said during an interview with KXAN’s Grace Reader. Meyers is the founding chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences at UT, according to the UT website.
“The consortium has been hard at work trying to take the technologies that we developed, the lessons that we learned during the pandemic and turn it into methods and software and practices that can be used by public health agencies all across the United States to prepare for future pandemics and to respond to future pandemics,” Meyers said.
She said epiENGAGE is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). According to the CDC website, UT “is responsible for implementing multi-scale outbreak decision-support tools to expand analytic capabilities.”
Meyers added that some of UT’s partners include the city of Austin, the city of El Paso, the city of Houston, the city of Dallas and the city of San Antonio. Furthermore, she said UT is working with the state of Texas, the state of Massachusetts and the city of New York
“So, one of the things that turned out to be incredibly useful during the pandemic was having reliable short-term forecasts of how many people were going to be going into local hospitals with COVID and how many people would actually need ICU care or more critical care,” she said.
The UT Modeling Consortium was able to build models to forecast all of those things, Meyers said. She said this allowed health care systems, public health agencies and decision-makers see the models, as well as the public.
“They could see when things were going up, when we needed to be nervous and maybe change our behavior or just take more precautions, and also when things are going down, and we could be more relaxed and get back to our life. Austin was really lucky to have a modeling team locally who could dedicate the time and effort to doing forecasts that really mattered at the local scale,” Meyers said.
With new technology being built with epiENGAGE, Meyers said this will allow the team to forecast influenza, COVID and RSV. This will also allow the team to not only forecast for Austin but also to cities all over Texas and the nation.
“We’re also trying to build those tools so that they are poised and they’re ready to go, and can be adapted when new threats emerge that don’t look like the ones that are currently circulating or that we’ve dealt with in the past,” she said.
