Could we someday forecast diseases like we forecast the weather? | Sara Del Valle | TEDxNJIT

Mathematical models, such as those that forecast the spread of epidemics or predict the weather, must overcome the challenges of integrating incomplete and inaccurate data in computer simulations, estimating the probability of multiple possible scenarios, incorporating changes in human behavior and/or the pathogen, and environmental factors. In the past 3 decades, the weather forecasting community has made significant advances in data collection, assimilating heterogeneous data steams into models and communicating the uncertainty of their predictions to the general public. Epidemic modelers are struggling with these same issues in forecasting the spread of emerging diseases, such as Ebola and most recently COVID-19. In this presentation, I will describe how we can apply many of the approaches used for weather forecasting to forecast epidemics and how this capability has the potential to reduce global disease burden. A-1, Los Alamos National Laboratory This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx