The COVID-19 pandemic has placed epidemic/pandemic modeling at the center of attention of public policymaking. Predicting the severity and speed of transmission of COVID-19 is crucial to resource management and developing strategies to deal with the pandemic. Baker Center personnel (Kim and Wang) have proposed a class of hybrid spatiotemporal epidemic models (STEM) by combining the strengths of mathematical and statistical models. They have developed two R packages to assist users in curating and visualizing COVID-19 data and making predictions. They created a dashboard to provide 7-day forecasts of the COVID-19 infected/death count at county and state levels, as well as a long-term projections up to four months in the future. Since May 2020, they have helped the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) make ensemble forecasts of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the US every week.
