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Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA)

A team of CCICADA researchers, led by Dr. Nina Fefferman, is working to determine the most efficient use of facilities during health-related environmental threats. Their work initially focused on events like extreme heat where the risk is uniform and based on such factors as severity of heat, population demographics and pre-existing health conditions, and resource availability (in materials, human capacity, and trained medical expertise) at each available healthcare facility. Fefferman’s team is now looking to expand these models to contagious diseases with the goal of optimizing the public health benefit derived from evacuation of at-risk populations to temporary healthcare facilities during outbreaks.

Their work aims to evacuate people for purposes of treatment, isolation, and quarantine during outbreaks of severely infectious diseases, with the goal of minimizing disease transmission and ultimate loss of life within the population. To that end, researchers are studying ways to include possibilities of transmission of diseases both pre- and post-evacuation. Taken into consideration are the different rates of transmission among demographic groups and within different types of housing/health care facilities. The ultimate goal is to maximize the benefit from public health efforts while minimizing them as a source of infection. The work involves theoretical optimization and visualization methods for computational simulations to explore the health impact of factors such as travel distance to healthcare facilities. Pictured, is an example using a simplified grid configuration with healthy and sick people moving along roadways between households, businesses, schools, and healthcare locations.