As the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, a new mathematical model could offer insights on how to improve future epidemic predictions based on how information mutates as it is transmitted from person to person and group to group. The Army Research Office funded this model, developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.

Researchers hope to improve future epidemic predictionsNew mathematical model uses information theory to improve epidemiological predictions

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — As the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, a new mathematical model could offer insights on how to improve future epidemic predictions based on how information mutates as it is transmitted from person to person and group to group.

The U.S. Army funded this model, developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University, through the Army Research Laboratory’s Army Research Office, both elements of the Combat Capabilities Development Command.

The model suggests that ideas and information spread and evolve between individuals with patterns similar to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressure as they interact with their host.

“These evolutionary changes have a huge impact,” said CyLab faculty member Osman Yagan, an associate research professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and corresponding author of the study. “If you don’t consider the potential changes over time, you will be wrong in predicting the number of people that will get sick or the number of people who are exposed to a piece of information.”

In their study, published March 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers developed a mathematical model that takes the evolutionary changes of both disease and information into consideration. The research tested the model against thousands of computer-simulated epidemics using data from two real-world networks: a contact network among students, teachers, and staff at a U.S. high school, and a contact network among staff and patients in a hospital in Lyon, France.

“We showed that our theory works over real-world networks,” said the study’s first author, Rashad Eletreby, who was a Carnegie Mellon doctoral candidate when he wrote the paper. “Traditional models that don’t consider evolutionary adaptations fail at predicting the probability of the emergence of an epidemic.”

The researchers said the epidemic model most widely used today is not designed to account for changes in the disease being tracked. This inability to account for changes in the disease can make it more difficult for leaders to counter a disease’s spread or make effective public health decisions such as when to institute stay at home orders or dispatch additional resources to an area.

“The spread of a rumor or of information through a network is very similar to the spread of a virus through a population,” said Dr. H. Vincent Poor, one of the researchers on this study and Princeton’s interim dean of engineering. “Different pieces of information have different transmission rates. Our model allows us to consider changes to information as it spreads through the network and how those changes affect the spread.”

While the study is not a silver bullet for predicting the spread of today’s coronavirus or the spread of misinformation, the authors say it is a big step.

In the future, the team hopes that their research can be used to improve the tracking of epidemics and pandemics by accounting for mutations in diseases and ultimately considering interventions like quarantines and then predicting how those interventions would affect an epidemic’s spread when the pathogen is mutating as it spreads.

“This work demonstrates the importance of basic research and the ability of scientists in various disciplines to inform each other’s work,” said Dr. Edward Palazzolo, program manager for the Social and Cognitive Networks Program at the Army Research Office. “Although in its early stages, these models show promise for understanding network diffusion in light of mutations.”

In addition to the Army, the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research also supported this research. Other researchers co-authored the paper include Yong Zhuang and Kathleen Carley from Carnegie Mellon University.

By CCDC Army Research Laboratory Public Affairs

WASHINGTON — A Defense Department contract under the Defense Production Act will provide more than 39 million N95 respirator masks over the next 90 days to help in the fight against the coronavirus, Defense Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper said.

“This will help ensure our government has the industrial capacity to meet the nation’s needs,” Esper said during a Pentagon news conference yesterday.

Also, he said, a $415 million contract awarded by the Defense Logistics Agency is providing 60 systems that can decontaminate as many as 80,000 N95 respirator masks each day, allowing those masks to be reused.

“This will allow medical professionals to reuse masks up to 20 times and will reduce the nation’s need for new inventory,” Esper said. Six decontamination units have already been delivered to cities including New York; Columbus, Ohio; Boston; Chicago; and Tacoma, Washington, and the rest should be available by early May, he added.

Combined, the 60 systems will allow for the decontamination of some 4.8 million masks each day once they’re all in place. Distribution of those systems will be handled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, Esper said.

DOD has delivered 10 million of the new N95 masks to FEMA and HHS already, the secretary said, and is prepared to provide 10 million more.

The Defense Department has more than 50,000 service members from all services deployed in support of the fight against the coronavirus, Esper told reporters, with more than 4,000 of those being military doctors, nurses and medical professionals. Around 2,100 of those are now in New York City, including 300 who are in civilian hospitals to relieve civilian medical professionals.

Experience has shown that local hospitals in cities such as New York do, in fact, have the number of beds needed to treat patients, but that medical professionals in those facilities have been overtaxed, Esper said, so that is where the U.S. military is focusing its assistance now.

“What’s obviously become strained, stressed, are these hard-working nurses and doctors and respiratory therapists and everybody who’s been at this now for weeks,” he said. “They’re getting burned out and worn down.” They’re also falling victim to the coronavirus themselves, he added.

“So that’s where we’ve now pivoted in the last week or so — to move our doctors — and we’re doing that now,” Esper said. DOD is moving some doctors off the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort, which is docked in New York, and putting them into the New York City hospitals to provide relief, he said.

Meanwhile, Esper said, the department is deploying 14 Army urban augmentation medical task forces to priority regions. Six of those task forces are in New York, three are in New Jersey, two are in Massachusetts, and Connecticut, Michigan and Pennsylvania have one each.

The Navy, he said, now has fully established expeditionary medic medical facilities in New Orleans and Dallas, while the Army Corps of Engineers is constructing 25 alternate care facilities around the nation that are expected to make available an additional 15,500 beds in cities such as New York, Detroit and Chicago. Construction of a 450-bed medical facility in Miami also is being discussed, Esper said.

By C. Todd Lopez, Defense.gov