Google Cloud AI and the Harvard Global Health Institute to offer COVID-19 Public Forecasts

Harvard Global Health Institute and Google Cloud have partnered to release the COVID-19 Public Forecasts.

These forecasts are offered for free. Additionally, these forecasts will also help with the projection of COVID-19 cases, deaths, and other metrics over the next 14 days for US counties and states, notes the announcement.

Dr. Edmund Jackson, Chief Data Officer at HCA Healthcare, said, "As healthcare providers, the ability to ever more accurately predict the evolution of this pandemic is vital to our ability to prepare for, and manage, the COVID-19 crisis. Having Google bring their unique compute and AI prowess to better answering this question is enormously helpful. We are excited to be part of this work."

Dr. Thomas Tsai, Surgeon and health policy researcher in the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital and in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said, "The COVID-19 Public Forecasts model produces forecasts at the critical jurisdiction of public health action—the county. Coupled with the work of the Harvard Global Health Institute’s county-level COVID-19 Suppression Metrics, the COVID-19 Public Forecast Model will allow for targeted testing and public health interventions on a county-by-county basis. By providing accurate, timely predictions of cases, infections, hospitalizations, and deaths to both policy makers and the general public, it will enhance our ability to understand and respond to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic."

Data from Johns Hopkins University, the United States Census Bureau, and Descartes Lab are used to train COVID-19 Public Forecasts. The Harvard Global Health Institute will continue to updates train these Forecasts.

Google Cloud researchers developed a time series machine learning approach to generate COVID-19 pubic forecasts. It combines AI with a robust epidemiological foundation, notes the announcement.

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