Minnesota is using a $17 million federal grant to learn from the pitfalls of COVID-19 forecasting in the last few years and to improve its predictions for the next outbreak.
Better estimates of cases of an infectious disease and how it spreads could improve responses and target them at high-risk regions or populations rather than the entire state, said Dr. R. Adams Dudley, a University of Minnesota health informatics professor who is co-leading the effort.
Better estimates also could prevent the damage that occurred during the COVID pandemic when wayward predictions undermined public confidence in the government's quarantine orders and restrictions.
"Think about the public trust cost of being wrong," Dudley said.
A consortium of Minnesota agencies announced last week that it is one of 13 research groups in the United States to receive federal funding to better prepare the nation for the next public health emergency. The group expects to make significant discoveries based on Minnesota's unique experience with COVID and a new shared medical record-keeping system that doesn't exist elsewhere.
Though COVID remains a concern — a revised state dashboard identified low but rising viral levels in wastewater this month — the Mayo Clinic and other prominent health care organizations stopped forecasting its spread months ago. A federally supported model called ENSEMBLE still predicts COVID hospitalization trends but not infections or deaths.
So the timing is ideal to learn from the pandemic and use that experience to create more precise tools, said Eva Enns, a U public health researcher who helped create Minnesota's initial COVID models in 2020.
It probably won't take another century for the next public health emergency to emerge, she said, because of environmental conditions and global mobility.