AUSTIN, Texas – The University of Texas at Austin has launched a new online portal tracking hospital capacity in 22 regions throughout the state and using that data to predict what's next to come with the pandemic.
What You Need To Know
- Portal available for anyone in the public to use
- Shows hospital and ICU capacity per region
- Predicts whether pandemic numbers are rising or falling
The portal was created by the school’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium and launched Monday.
According to the university, researchers combine data on how many people are hospitalized in a region with anonymous cellphone mobility data in those same areas to predict how the pandemic might progress.
The school first used this technique with data in the Austin area. Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the UT COVID-19 modeling consortium and a professor of integrative biology explains the data can be used to help make decisions for how individual communities should move forward during the pandemic.
“This provides important information for navigating the pandemic in the months ahead,” Meyers said in a news release. “People across the state can use this data to track the risks in their own community and decide when it may be time to enact or relax control measures.”
If you’re looking at the data, one of the first numbers you want to look for is the reproduction number, known as R(t) according to researchers.
Once you select a specific location in the portal, you’ll notice that number on the left under the drop down if you’re viewing on a desktop computer.
The reproduction number is the likelihood of someone with COVID-19 infecting another person. If that number is one, that means someone is likely to infect one other person. If that number is greater than one, researchers say the pandemic is likely on the rise in the area. If it’s less than one, then the pandemic may be declining.
Researchers with the project, though, say that if people keep up “mitigating behavior,” like social distancing and mask wearing, it’s unlikely that the state will reach hospital or ICU capacity this September.
“There is some concern that when the flu season picks up, as it usually does, some of the hospital and ICU capacity could be taken up by flu cases, leaving less room for COVID-19 patients,” said Spencer Fox, associate director of the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium in a press release.