IEEE Spectrum June, 2015 - 63

Special Report

Hacking the Human OS

AT THE EPIDEMIC'S
EPICENTER

John Moore/Getty iMaGes

terrified that the program he'd written for the earlier exercise might have
an overlooked bug. So he asked Schlitt
to write an entirely new one, in a few
hours, using different software. "People's lives were on the line," Telionis
recalls months later. "We were actually
pretty nervous the whole weekend."
The two students barely slept, but
they delivered their 19-page product-
including maps, tables, and animations-
at 6:26 a.m. on Monday. They beat their
deadline by an hour and a half.
DiD tHe Virginia tecH moDels

make a difference to the Ebola
response? We may never know for sure.
The map of the treatment centers that
the Defense Department built certainly
looks a lot like the one that Telionis and

Schlitt turned in. Beyond that, it's
impossible to say, because Defense
Department officials won't comment.
The same uncertainty surrounds
the weekly forecasts other Virginia
Tech modelers gave to the DTR A
from August 2014 through February
2015, which included predictions of
the epidemic's likely course and estimates of how various interventions
might change it. DTRA officials say the
work was "actually useful," but they
won't provide details. People at the
Pentagon, the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), and the
U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services will speak of the modeling's
utility only in general terms.
The researchers who were desperately crunching the numbers dur-

A Liberian child sits in an Ebola isolation
ward housing people who might have
contracted the contagious disease.

ing the outbreak say that real-time
epidemic modeling, done for policymakers since the 2003 SARS outbreak,
got its harshest test with Ebola. For
the most affected countries-Guinea,
Liberia, and Sierra Leone-much of
the data used to generate epidemic
models was missing, old, or unreliable. That included information on
population, household size, daily
activities, travel patterns, and the condition and even the existence of roads.
Data on key disease-specific variables,
such as new cases per week and time
from symptom onset to hospitalization, was also spotty for much of the

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2015

IEEE Spectrum June, 2015 - Cover1
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