Celebrating 2 Years of IEM’s COVID-19 Predictive Modeling

Celebrating 2 Years of IEM’s COVID-19 Predictive Modeling

IEM is proud to have supported coronavirus pandemic response initiatives nationally and internationally over the past two years through our COVID-19 predictive modeling capabilities. The pandemic challenged our team to innovate in new ways to respond to the public health crisis as well as other emergencies and disasters, all while working to protect those most vulnerable.

 

AI-Based Model

Drawing on IEM’s nearly four decades of experience planning for, responding to, recovering from, and mitigating against disasters, our team pivoted early in 2020 to bolster pandemic response and recovery capabilities by creating an artificial intelligence (AI) model, much like a hurricane prediction model, to evaluate and predict coronavirus case trends across the country. Refined in March 2020, our proprietary AI model has since provided public health and emergency management leaders in all 50 states, including Washington, D.C., three U.S. territories, and eight regional entities with accurate 7-day projections of coronavirus cases that were consistently within 10%, and are often within 5%, of actual confirmed cases. The accuracy and quality of our data and predictions, earned our COVID-19 predictive modeling the opportunity to be included in both the ensemble forecasts done by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Our COVID-19 projection model also provided decision makers at the local and state level with accurate data to better inform operational and logistical planning, including trends in hospitalizations, needs for testing and medical supplies, and locations experiencing high transmission rates.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, IEM sent out over 23,000 COVID-19 projection reports pro bono to our partners across the country. Our team ran more than 1.7 billion simulations every day and over 700 billion total simulations over the past two years. IEM’s COVID-19 AI Modeling received Washington Technology’s 2020 Industry Innovator Award.

The Pandemic & Beyond

IEM is a national leader in public health policy, planning, modeling, and response. Over the course of the pandemic, IEM exponentially expanded its public health capabilities to provide accurate data and information on case trends as well as to distribute and administer lifesaving vaccinations and treatment options to our nation’s most vulnerable populations.

Due to the ever-evolving nature of the pandemic and diminishing availability of data, after two years of running our award-winning COVID-19 modeling projections, we will no longer be sending out our COVID-19 projections to partners across the country nor contributing to the CDC ensemble.

We do remain committed to assisting our clients and partners in their public health and emergency response and recovery needs now and in the future as the fight against the pandemic continues.