To better understand the outbreak of COVID‑19 on a local level, we are monitoring wastewater samples from water reclamation facilities in Athens, Georgia. Wastewater surveillance is an emerging tool for monitoring disease outbreaks. Coupled with clinical surveillance, it can be used to estimate the level of viruses circulating in local population. Samples are collected weekly and tested to detect the disease-causing virus, SARS‑CoV‑2. Taken together with clinical surveillance, wastewater surveillance is intended to inform public health decisions.
Can we predict the emergence and spillover of infectious diseases like Ebola or COVID-19? Can we develop an infectious disease warning system that is analogous to weather forecasts, that pinpoints the origin and path of disease spread?
In this free webinar presented by UIDP, John Drake will describe the surveillance tools used to understand how interactions between humans and pathogenic reservoir-species may lead to spillover events. He’ll also discuss the dynamical models that researchers use once an outbreak has been reported to understand how an infectious disease spatially spreads.
Drake will also introduce the Global Infectious Disease Intelligence Consortium (GIDIC), which brings together leaders in academia, federal agencies, industry, and NGOs to discuss the challenges that pandemics create and how they can be collectively solved.
America needs a national center for infectious disease intelligence
June 21, 2020 | by John M. Drake | The Hill
In an opinion piece published in The Hill, CEID Director John Drake made the case that the time is now to establish a national center for infectious disease intelligence to monitor trends and provide real-time interpretation of outbreak data through modeling, biostatistics, and data science.
Read the complete opinion at TheHill.com.
May 7, 2020
CEID Director John Drake discusses how COVID‑19 modeling informs public policy and mitigation efforts on Debriefing the Briefing with CBS News Washington Correspondent Major Garrett.
Listen the podcast here.
Why One Expert Is Still Making COVID‑19 Models, Despite The Uncertainty
April 17, 2020 | by John M. Drake | FiveThirtyEight.com
Read the full article on FiveThirtyEight.com.
The Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases (CEID) and the College of Public Health (CPH) at UGA have created a new interactive tracker that allows users to track the spread of COVID‑19 both in the US and worldwide. The tracker allows users to explore cases, hospitalizations, deaths and number of tests for every US state, as well as cases and deaths worldwide. Users can adjust the plots by choosing total or daily numbers, absolute or normalized values, and calendar date versus date since a certain number of cases occurred. The data comes from the Covid Tracking Project and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Dr. John Drake urges swift, decisive action to curb spread of COVID‑19.
In an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CEID Director Dr. John Drake has called for immediate and decisive intervention to slow the spread of COVID‑19. Based on a study of government intervention in China following the initial outbreak of COVID‑19 in Wuhan, CEID researchers found a very strong correlation (90%) between how early a major intervention was imposed in a province and the ultimate severity of the outbreak there. The results show that early action yields critical gains, with every delay of 3.8 days leading to a tenfold increase in cases.
Opinion: Now’s the time to act on coronavirus. Guest column. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 13, 2020
November 4, 2020
CEID has released its model of spatial spread for US counties. The model looked at county populations, case counts, non-pharmaceutical interventions, commuting flows, flight volumes and Facebook’s Social Connectedness Index to build a model that describes how the risk of the outbreak spreading to each county changed over time during the first six months of the pandemic. The model will be useful in the future, when COVID‑19 is eliminated from some counties, as a tool to predict risk of re-introduction. covid19.uga.edu/spatial-us
September 22, 2020
CEID has released its stochastic model for the US. The model takes into account human actions that are difficult to quantify (e.g., wearing of face masks), in addition to human mobility quantified through cell phone data. The new model fits reported cases, deaths, movement data, and a temporal trend in transmission capturing other human behaviors. The model projects cases, hospitalizations and deaths six weeks out under three social distancing scenarios. covid19.uga.edu/forecast
August 31, 2020
CEID’s statistical forecasting model is now included on the COVID‑19 ForecastHub, a CDC-coordinated record and visualization of forecasts by modeling teams from around the globe. All forecasts on the ForecastHub are updated weekly. Information about the model (referred to on ForecastHub as “CEID-Walk”) can be found here.
August 30, 2020
CEID researchers have produced a model of the risk of COVID‑19 importation via each US port-of-entry airport, and the risk of imporation to the US from each country currently flying to the US. Results are updated monthly on the COVID‑19 Portal here
August 25, 2020
UGA’s College of Public Health is now monitoring wastewater samples from reclamation facilities in Athens, Georgia, in order to help anticipate outbreaks and estimate the level of SARS‑CoV‑2 circulating in the population. Results are updated weekly on the COVID‑19 Portal here
August 15, 2020
COVID‑19 Portal now includes a model for SARS‑CoV‑2 transmission on a university campus. The model estimated imported cases at the start of a semester and considers both generalized interventions and testing programs. Model details here
CEID’s updated stochastic model for the COVID‑19 outbreak in Georgia now accounts for human actions that are difficult to quantify with data (e.g., wearing of face masks), in addition to human movement quantified through cell phone data and other sources. The new model fits reported cases, deaths, movement data, and a temporal trend in baseline transmission capturing other human behaviors. The model projects cases, hospitalizations and deaths six weeks out under three social distancing scenarios. covid19.uga.edu/stochastic-GA.
The Nowcast of the COVID‑19 outbreak size by US state has launched on the COVID‑19 Portal. The Nowcast is an estimate of the total number of unreported cases by state. Nowcasts are estimated for the 50 states and for the US as a whole, and are calculated from COVID‑19 case reports and fatalities. covid19.uga.edu/nowcast
March 15, 2020
The COVID‑19 Portal now includes a stochastic model for the COVID‑19 outbreak in the state of Georgia. covid19.uga.edu/stochastic-GA.
March 15, 2020
CEID has released an anlysis of the effect of early intervention on its COVID‑19 Portal. The analysis of intervention timing and outbreak size by province in China clearly demonstrates the importance of early intervention.
March 3, 2020
The CEID COVID‑19 Portal now includes a model that provides insight into the final size of the ongoing COVID‑19 outbreak. The model estimates global outbreak sizes by probabilistically incorporating the sparking of new local outbreaks across the globe. The model estimates outbreak sizes for best-case, worst-case and average-case scenarios under a range of assumptions, including how fast local containment efforts improve.