Published 28 June 2017
"There was something about showing a movie of your hometown that people relate to," said Don Burke, dean of Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health. It was his idea to break the data modeling down by county. "The FRED platform allowed researchers to build a simulation of human interaction dynamics," said Mark Roberts, director of the Public Health Dynamics Lab and HPM chair, "wherein virtual people in 116 million households across the country live, work and socialize according to data synthesized from the U.S. Census."
The FRED measles model, developed at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, can be used to visualize infectious disease dynamics in any county, allowing California's Senator Richard Pan to show his fellow senators exactly how an outbreak would play out in their own backyards.