Page 7 - The Next Pandemic: What's to Come?

online searches and COVID-19 deaths averaged about twenty-
one days. This is remarkably close to the twenty-day gap doctors
have seen between onset of serious COVID-19 symptoms and
deaths. Vespignani’s team makes similar forecasts using tweets
about lockdowns, quarantines, and face mask rules. They tend to
show where people are planning to travel—and where the virus
might bubble up next. MOBS Lab researchers even account for
data that might be artifi cially infl ated by fake news or sensational
media stories that create a short-term panic. The lab continues
to add data from new sources to pinpoint outbreaks with more
accuracy. Among the sources are UpToDate, a fact-checking
database used by medical professionals, and Kinsa Insights, a
database that collects users’ body temperatures.
In December 2020 Vespignani and the MOBS Lab began
sharing their results with the WHO, the White House, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation. The next step for the MOBS Lab is to make its
data and forecasts available for public use online. This would help
integrate its work with that of local health offi cials. Using nearly re-
al-time data, offi cials could make better decisions about tightening
or loosening restrictions on the basis of a viral threat. The MOBS
system could help forecast trends in infectious disease weeks in
advance of current methods. Mauricio Santillana, a professor at
Harvard Medical School who partners with the MOBS Lab, be-
lieves that bringing health offi cials on board is crucial. “We’ve cre-
ated a way to show public health offi cials what’s going through
our minds,” Santillana says. “We want them to see what we see.” 6

Using the Internet of Everything
Some experts hope to go beyond simply tracking disease out-
breaks. They want to derail epidemics before they get started.
The solution, they believe, lies with big data, especially data pro-
duced by the so-called Internet of Everything, or IoE. With de-
vices around the world connected to each other and talking all
the time, vast amounts of data are produced, categorized, and

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