Fighting Flu With Math: Predicting Peak Season, Spread, and Vaccination Patterns
Flu activity in the United States continues to rise, with the percentage of people visiting their health care providers for flu-like illnesses up in the week ending February 5, 2019, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) weekly FluView. The mathematical model, developed by NYU [Tandon School of Engineering] professor Maurizio Porfiri, PhD, MSc, and 2 Italian investigators with visiting appointments at NYU [Tandon School of Engineering], analyzes epidemiological and sociological factors to predict when the influenza season will peak, who should be vaccinated, when vaccinations should occur, and whether to quarantine infected patients, according to study published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems.
