Page 5 - The Next Pandemic: What's to Come?

together. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the Ameri-
can Public Health Association, believes that Rivers’s proposal
would work. Benjamin notes that an online retailer like Amazon
collects massive amounts of data about its customers every day.
The data includes where they live, what they eat, what they do
for recreation, and what their destinations are when they travel.
This data could be used to create more accurate models of how
disease outbreaks might move through the population. It could
also help forecast other epidemics related
to health care. As Benjamin notes, “If we
had such a system, we would have had a “All of our data systems
better early warning on opioid epidemics, are very silo based. They
we would have had a better early warn- don’t talk to one another,
ing on the obesity epidemic, we absolutely and they’re not fast.” 5
would have had a better early warning on — Georges C. Benjamin, executive
this [COVID-19] infectious disease epi- director of the American Public
demic. All of our data systems are very silo Health Association
based. They don’t talk to one another, and
they’re not fast.” 5
Currently, models for infectious disease rely mostly on public
health data gathered at the local level and compiled at the Nation-
al Center for Health Statistics. The modelers work at universities
and private foundations, while the data people reside in govern-
ment offi ces. Rivers and others believe data collection, modeling,
and forecasting for disease outbreaks should all take place under
a single umbrella group—a health care version of the National
Weather Service. Coordinating these tasks could allow health of-
fi cials to track disease outbreaks in real time.

The MOBS Lab
Among the modelers anxious to join this effort is Alessandro Ves-
pignani, a research scientist at Northeastern University in Boston,
Massachusetts. Vespignani and his team use 1 million computer
processors to create complex simulations of virus outbreaks.
Their approach, however, is even more ambitious than that of

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