NSF Award
2327844
One of the most critical modern challenges is to better understand the where, why and how oflarge disease outbreak occurrence. Research shows that the frequency of large disease outbreaks is increasing over time globally, and yet differences in outcomes remain poorly understood. This research will explore the factors that drove variation in COVID-19 outcomes across the counties and metropolitan areas of Oklahoma, particularly which areas had more or fewer cases than would be expected based on their overall population size. The investigators will look at both environmental factors, such as weather patterns and air quality, and socioeconomic factors such as numbers of doctors and differences in the proportion of individuals that were willing to be vaccinated. The investigators will also conduct surveys of individual across the state to try and better understand why people made the healthcare choices that they did and how behavior drove differences in outcomes. Understanding all of these factors requires a team with diverse expertise. Traditionally, most mathematical and quantitative models for disease dynamics have been developed and studied by mathematicians, ecologists, and computer scientists. However, understanding differences in attitudes towards health care measures and how they originate is more the purview of social scientists and historians. By building a team of collaborators spanning all of these disciplines, the research team will be able to build a more complete picture of COVID-19 outcomes in Oklahoma. This will in turn suggest what actions may be most effective to try and best mitigate the effects of both COVID and other large-scale disease events in the future. The final product of this work will include a new data repository and a public-facing intelligent epidemiological modeling platform powered by Jupyter Notebooks. The project will also provide outreach and training, including to students from underrepresented groups.<br/><br/>Increases in outbreak frequency seem to be related to globalization and other human activities. Yet the effects of most human behavioral, social and economic factors on outbreak risk are rarely quantified. Relevant social factors can be hard to measure, often needing specialists to generate and interpret data. However social scientists with expertise to do so are rarely trained in mathematical modelling of disease dynamics. To address these challenges, the investigators will focus on developing data sources and mathematical models that can be used to explore COVID-19 outcomes in Oklahoma. The project will be a true collaboration between social scientists and experts in modelling infectious diseases. Oklahoma is understudied, and is spatially heterogeneous such that models of disease dynamics in Oklahoma are likely to be generalizable to many other regions of the US. The Investigators will generate protocols for standardizing existing data on behavioral and socioeconomic factors as well as develop new data sources. The team will develop statistical models of past outbreaks, and mathematical models reflecting factors shown to have driven COVID-19 dynamics empirically. The latter work will demonstrate how baseline SIR-like models can be modified to reflect human behavioral factors. The Investigators will also contrast the performance of models based on existing data on socioeconomic factors with models incorporating new survey data on variation in behaviors and attitudes related to primary and secondary prevention. The code and datasets to be generated will be made freely available and searchable in an intelligent epidemiological modeling framework, which will enable other researchers to easily iterate on them.<br/><br/>This project is jointly funded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and the Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES) in the Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE).<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
