Research Team – Columbia University

Alexis Zebrowski, Andrew Rundle, Sen Pei, Tonguc Yaman, Wan Yang, Brendan Carr, Sara Sims, Ronan Doorley, Neil Schluger, Jeff Shaman, Charles Branas

COVID forecasting/Mapping/Surge-response/Public service/Data visualization

A team of researchers from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine collaborated to provide the U.S. with compelling visualizations of 6-week look-forward projections of coming COVID-19 case loads, deaths, hospitalizations, and hospital ICU capacity under varying levels of possible hospital surge responses. These data are generated for each county in the U.S. and continue to be updated each Monday and provide a publicly available national picture of the projected course of the pandemic in the coming 6-weeks. The interactive online mapping tool is here: https://tinyurl.com/beh-columbia-maps and our interactive data graphing tool is here: https://cuepi.shinyapps.io/COVID-19/. This suite of weekly COVID-19 projections, hospital capacity models and visualization tools was collectively dubbed the “Columbia Model” by the NY Times. A paper describing the methods used to create the projections and hospital capacity models has been accepted for publication in the American Journal of Public Health. These visualization tools and the case load and hospital capacity projection data were used to provide briefings to Congresswoman Anna Eshoo and her staff and to the staff of Congressman Ron Johnson, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Similarly these tools were used for planning COVID-19 responses by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Air Force, CDC, the Federal Reserve, Pfizer, MetLife, Gym Source, Fidelity, Unilever and numerous county and state planning and public health offices. Customized versions of these tools are being finalized to advise groups including county health departments and Fortune 500 financial services on planning return to workplace for locations across the U.S.

https://tinyurl.com/beh-columbia-maps%20;%20https://cuepi.shinyapps.io/COVID-19/