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

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.