WSU joins infectious disease forecasting team

PULLMAN — Washington State University will be a part of a $17.5 million effort to strengthen responses to infectious disease outbreaks.

Led by the University of Utah in collaboration with WSU, the endeavor will elicit researchers to improve disease forecasting and response throughout the Mountain West.

The project is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provided a five-year $17.5 million grant. The funds will be used to establish one of 13 centers, collectively called the Outbreak Analytics and Disease Modeling Network.

Note: The previous paragraph was corrected from the original version to correctly identify the collective name of the 13 centers.

Eric Lofgren, WSU associate professor and project co-lead, said the COVID-19 pandemic evoked a real need for disease forecasting.

“Before the pandemic, forecasting was much broader,” Lofgren said. “We had a national and state level for, kind of, predicting outbreaks. But you also had universities, school systems and hospitals that all needed to know what’s going to come in the next couple of weeks. The goal is to try to enhance our ability to actually do that.”

During the pandemic, disease forecasting provided tools that guided public health responses. By tracking who was infected and where, forecasting data was able to advise and prepare hospitals for outbreaks, assist health departments in planning vaccine distribution and guide the public when to wear masks.

The project’s goal is to expand forecasting to smaller communities, providing updates on pandemics or even flu seasons.

In the future, ForeSITE will support decision-makers through every stage of a health threat. Using data-driven analyses from disease data, the program could send out automated alerts, assess magnitudes of risk and transmission, monitor and forecast outbreaks, model scenarios and provide data on effects on business and the economy.

The project will work in partnership with the national Veterans Affairs health system, hospitals and health departments in Utah, Washington, Idaho and Montana. Local entities partnered with ForeSITE include Pullman Regional Hospital, Whitman County Public Health and the Spokane Health Department.

Lofgren said ForeSITE acts as a proactive measure, providing tools for public health partners and putting a system in place for future pandemics and epidemics.

“One of the things we discovered during the pandemic is a pandemic is a very bad time to build relationships and set up systems,” Lofgren said. “The goal is to get a lot of that set up ahead of time, so when we do have a public health emergency, we can turn on the system we’ve already got.”

Lofgren said WSU is thrilled to be a part of this effort.

“We’re really glad for the opportunity to try to represent and meet the needs of the people in eastern Washington,” Lofgren said. “We’re making sure that we have tools that are meant to serve the people who, as a land grant university, we’re meant to be serving.”

Pearce can be reached at epearce@dnews.com