artist's rendering of the coronavirus

David Gurarie, of the Department of Mathematics, remarks on the challenges with modeling the outbreak of COVID-19

University of Washington projection: Coronavirus won’t overwhelm Ohio hospitals and ICU beds

Cleveland.com: David Gurarie, professor of mathematics who studies infectious diseases modeling and epidemiology, weighed in on the challenges of modeling the outbreak of diseases: “[In] COVID-modeling at present are big uncertainties of its transmission (rates, pathways), as well as recovery, pathogenicity (fraction of “heavy infections” over “light/asymptomatic”), fatality,” he wrote. “It is believed that a large pool of undetected (asymptomatic) hosts contributes to transmission, which creates large uncertainty for model prediction.”