New CDC team: A weather service to forecast what's next in pandemic
A new team of federal health scientists officially embarked Tuesday on a mission to provide what has often been absent from the nation's response to the coronavirus pandemic: better, faster information about what is likely to happen next in this public health emergency and in future outbreaks.
"We think of ourselves like the National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases," said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist and associate director for science at the initiative, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 100 scientists will analyze technical data and communicate policy options to decision-makers and the public about how the virus is behaving and who is most at risk - in user-friendly terms.
"We would love to be able for people to look to us to say, 'I'm about to commute on the Red Line. . . . Should I bring a mask based on what's happening with respiratory disease in my community? Should I have my birthday party outside or inside?' Those kinds of decisions, I think, are where we would like to move toward," Rivers said.
The Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which starts with $200 million in funding, was created last summer to improve understanding by the CDC and the government more broadly of the coronavirus - and future outbreaks - in real time. White House officials formally launched the effort Tuesday at a summit hosted by the Office on Science and Technology Policy on strengthening U.S. early-warning systems for health threats.
Jake Sullivan, President Biden's national security adviser, noted that the creation of the center was enshrined in the administration's first national security memorandum, issued Jan. 21, 2021.
Newly appointed White House coronavirus response coordinator Ashish Jha said public health leaders have scrambled during the pandemic to do the best they can.
"But it's also been really clear, this is no way to run a response to a pandemic," Jha told panelists at the event.
Without a centralized, trusted source for forecasting, "policymaking in that context is nearly impossible," Jha said. "That, to me, is going to be a major contribution of this center. I feel like we are embarking on a process that will put us in a totally different footing for the rest of this crisis and future ones."
Uncertain moments
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said the "very small but very mighty" team will analyze every stage of a health threat, from its epidemic potential to a comparison of health interventions. The center will also prioritize identifying vulnerable groups who are often invisible because they are not captured in data.
The center comes into existence at an uncertain moment in the pandemic.
As the United States plods wearily into the third year of the health crisis, covid-19 cases are rising. But it remains unclear whether new, highly transmissible versions of the omicron variant in New York state and Europe will trigger a new wave of infections.
If there is another surge, elected leaders could be wary of reinstituting restrictions such as mask mandates, given the availability of vaccines and therapeutics and a political environment in which many Americans express ambivalence, or even outright hostility, toward vaccines and public health recommendations.
When Walensky tapped outside experts to head the new outfit, the move was widely viewed as an acknowledgment of long-standing and systemic failures regarding surveillance, data collection and preparedness that were put into high relief by the pandemic.
There is no national system in the United States for infectious-disease forecasting. During the last major health threats - the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic, the 2014 to 2016 Ebola epidemic, the 2016 Zika outbreak - the CDC had some experts, but the public health agency also enlisted volunteer academic experts.
"Academic experts have been acting as volunteer surge capacity, but that's not sustainable," Rivers said.
Experts, including Rivers and others on the team, have long advocated for an infectious-disease forecasting center.
The center will provide support and analyses to decision-makers in the federal government and in states. That includes forecasting how many covid cases might be expected in coming days and weeks by analyzing the number of new cases and hospitalizations, and examining the population groups most affected.
Scientists will also look at who is infecting whom, how well vaccines protect against infection and severe illness, and how that depends on the vaccine, variants and the time since vaccination, said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist and the center's science director.
Practical questions
The center will work with other experts in government and the private sector to answer practical questions about how well certain measures - contact tracing and isolation, closing borders, masking, testing travelers - work to reduce transmission. That will "help decision-makers choose policies that are the most effective and the least costly and disruptive," Lipsitch said in an email.
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