A computational model that forecasts the number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States as a whole and in each state developed by a team of researchers from UC San Diego and Northeastern University is now part of the national mortality forecast issued by the Centers for Disease Control.
UC San Diego joins a roster of prestigious institutions who are included in the CDC’s prediction algorithms, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Notre Dame. Among the University of California, three institutions are part of the forecast: UC San Diego, UCLA and UC Merced.
“Our goal is to provide insights to policymakers as they make decisions about reopening,” said Yian Ma, an assistant professor at the UC San Diego Halicioglu Data Science Institute who co-leads the UC San Diego modeling effort with Rose Yu, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Currently, the model is predicting a steady increase in the number of deaths during flu season, without dramatic spikes.
Ma and Yu are partnering with Matteo Chinazzi and Alessandro Vespignani at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, a research group that regularly consults about the pandemic for the CDC.