Three years after Austin's first COVID case was detected, the director of UT Austin's Center for Pandemic Decision Science says it's a matter of when, not if, another pandemic arrives. She and her fellow researchers want to be prepared.
Murals cover boarded-up businesses along Sixth Street in April 2020, as Austin residents are advised to stay at home because of the coronavirus.Mark Escott’s role as interim public health authority of Austin-Travis County was meant to be a quick, six-month stint.
Escott’s six months as health authority turned into 20 as he became the face of Austin’s pandemic response. On March 13, 2020, it was Escott who announced theof COVID-19. He continued to share vital updates on the virus, guiding the public through the lockdown and urging caution as case counts reached multiple peaks.
He is focused now on using the lessons he learned from this pandemic to be ready for what comes next. So, what can we do to be ready for that next pathogen? That’s what Meyers, Escott and more than 40 other multidisciplinary experts from across the globe hope to determine.With the help of a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, CPDS grew out of Meyers’ work leading the COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which uses data to track the spread of COVID locally and nationally.
Leading strategies to deal with future pandemics could come from Austin’s own playbook, including Meyers’ forecasting models and Austin Public Health’s staged alert system, which ranked community risk from COVID at levels from Stage 1 to Stage 5, with each stage bearing a specific set of behavior recommendations, such as masking and avoiding crowds. According to Meyers, this local system was among the most advanced and effective in the country.
The challenge of understanding human behavior will require a multidisciplinary approach. Meyers said this is an area where her work from the Modeling Consortium could still be advanced through the use of data that tracks people's movement through their cellphones
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