The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges worldwide. Strained healthcare providers make difficult decisions on patient triage, treatment and care management on a daily basis. Policy makers have imposed social distancing measures to slow the disease, at a steep economic price. We design analytical tools to support these decisions and combat the pandemic. Specifically, we propose a comprehensive data-driven approach to understand the clinical characteristics of COVID-19, predict its mortality, forecast its evolution, and ultimately alleviate its impact. By leveraging cohort-level clinical data, patient-level hospital data, and census-level epidemiological data, we develop an integrated four-step approach, combining descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics. First, we aggregate hundreds of clinical studies into the most comprehensive database on COVID-19 to paint a new macroscopic picture of the disease. Second, we build personalized calculators to predict the risk of infection and mortality as a function of demographics, symptoms, comorbidities, and lab values. Third, we develop a novel epidemiological model to project the pandemic's spread and inform social distancing policies. Fourth, we propose an optimization model to reallocate ventilators and alleviate shortages. Our results have been used at the clinical level by several hospitals to triage patients, guide care management, plan ICU capacity, and re-distribute ventilators. At the policy level, they are currently supporting safe back-to-work policies at a major institution and equitable vaccine distribution planning at a major pharmaceutical company, and have been integrated into the US Center for Disease Control's pandemic forecast. COVID-19 | Epidemiological modeling | Machine learning | OptimizationI n just a few weeks, the whole world has been upended by the outbreak of COVID-19, an acute respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2. The virus is highly contagious: it is easily transmitted from person to person via respiratory droplet nuclei and can persist on surfaces for days (1, 2). As a result, COVID-19 has spread rapidly-classified by the World Health Organization as a public health emergency on January 30, 2020 and as a pandemic on March 11. As of mid-May, over 4.5 million cases and 300,000 deaths have been reported globally (3).Because no treatment is currently available, healthcare providers and policy makers are wrestling with unprecedented challenges. Hospitals and other care facilities are facing shortages of beds, ventilators and personal protective equipmentraising hard questions on how to treat COVID-19 patients with scarce supplies and how to allocate resources to prevent further shortages. At the policy level, most countries have imposed "social distancing" measures to slow the spread of the pandemic. These measures allow strained healthcare systems to cope with the disease by "flattening the curve" (4) but also come at a steep economic price (5,6). Nearly all governments are now confronted to ...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.