AUSTIN, TX — Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new tool to not only look at how Texas has done in its fight against the coronavirus.
It can also look into the future. How? And how can we use it to help protect ourselves?
We first met Joanna Burrell of Waco in May, the time, social distancing had just come into Vogue.
”I just see crowds everywhere and carts everywhere and germs everywhere and this virus can live on items so everything you're touching, I just don't know the answer," she told us at the time.
Scientists at the University of Texas say they had her and others, in mind when they developed a forecasting tool to study the coronavirus.
It's the same group that, early in the pandemic, came up with colorful graphs showing when the virus might peak in central Texas hospitals.
Their new tool doesn't look as colorful but it aims to show, not only explains where different regions in Texas stand, it even predicts where things might go up to three weeks into the future!
As Dr. Spencer Fox explains, the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium mixes biology and math to help predict what the virus will do, and how we're likely to react.
"The consortium is really, you know, us trying to harness, an interdisciplinary effort towards modeling of COVID-19 right now," he explained.
Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers, who has worked on disease modeling for more than two decades, leads the team that has created this new dashboard.
"We're using the best epidemiological understanding of the disease to make, you know, data-driven prediction or projections for the next few weeks. ," said Dr. Fox.
What kind of projections can the consortium make? Mostly it takes into account what the group calls "non-pharmaceutical" things like face coverings and social distancing.
"What our new tool does though, is basically in real-time. It estimates the effect of the non-pharmaceutical interventions going on in the community, and basically estimates, how much transmission is happening in the community, in real-time, it makes projections only three or four weeks ahead, but those projections are based off of the trends we're seeing today, " he explained.
And if nothing drastically affects those trends, Joanna Burrell and the rest of us can have a new tool to use to adjust our own COVID protection, as we work to avoid the virus.
”I'm kind of OCD, I kind of step back and I kind of, like, step my distance and I just let someone go in front of me,” she said.
Good advice says Dr. Fox who warns the tool isn't meant to replace any of the anti-virus practices we've been told to use. He says we still need to use face coverings, hand washing, and other measures consistently to kill coronavirus.
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