Page 6 - The Next Pandemic: What's to Come?

most modelers. Their goal is to simulate the movements and be-
havior of every person on earth, or more than 7 billion individuals.
Vespignani’s project is called the Laboratory for the Modeling
of Biological and Socio-technical Systems, or the MOBS Lab. It
seeks to overcome one of the main problems in predicting the
spread of a viral disease. Data about local outbreaks, including
cases and deaths, is already out of date by the time it is reported.
This makes it almost useless to public health offi cials trying to
implement measures to stop the spread. The MOBS Lab stays
ahead of this information curve by predicting trends in how a vi-
rus will spread. The predictions are based on minute-by-minute
information from social media, medical databases, and apps that
track people’s travel patterns on the ground and in the air.
The MOBS Lab looks for signals in social media that show how
a virus is moving. For example, with COVID-19, its researchers
found that increases in coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths in
an area could be forecast from increases in Google searches for
virus keywords such as “fever” or “cough.” The lag time between

A health care version of the National Weather Service could
speed America’s response to the next pandemic. Instead of
forecasting hazardous weather events, this system would
forecast and issue warnings about disease outbreaks.