These are our US ensemble forecasts (just my team) from this week. The Northeast is taking off early, but the US as a whole (black dots) looks exactly the same as last season at this point in time (red dots). This is still bad, because last season was a bad year, but not "super flu"

Precisely so, I look forward to convening a Wed AM panel on "Confronting Covid's Wake."

We will explore the link between COVID responses, anti-science, and misinformation… and how & why to support evidence-based inquiry to confront disease threats.

virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/event/public...

Sad we’ll miss you this year!

There is a lot going on here and lots to criticize in the forecasts, but overall prediction markets could be really promising for disease forecasting

Here's the paper if you prefer to read that rather than my summer in the blog post above: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

In the paper we show how a single parameter addition with some epidemiological peak dynamic modeling seems to be able to help improve forecasts from every model we tested on (including the COVID-19 ensemble model)! We were really surprised that the approach rarely led to worse forecast performance.

This is actually fairly normal for measles, with countries often coming in and out of elimination status (figure from the paper showing those dynamics). It's important now to redouble vaccination efforts to get elimination status back on track!