CovidAnalytics.io
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 re-allocate 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.
A critical tool for COVID-19 planning is charting out the progression of the pandemic across the United States and the world. They have developed a new epidemiological model called DELPHI, which forecasts infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. You can think of our model as a standard SEIR model with additional features specific to the COVID-19 pandemic, like under-detection and differentiated government intervention.
This project connects to SDG 3, Good Health and Well-Being.
Researchers
The Research project is led by Professor Dimitris Bertsimas of MIT. Several collaborators, students and partners work on this large effort.
Papers and Media
View the project and ongoing research on the Covid Analytics Project Website.