"These ‘disease hunters’ developed a novel technique for tracking pandemics after 9/11, but lost funding right before COVID-19" cnbc.com/2020/04/04/syn…
The first aha moment was the idea of monitoring ambulance dispatches
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxBn0FXgAIccTU.jpg)
My friend Rick Heffernan and I worked literally around the clock for weeks to set up feeds from EDs, and wrote the first code for analyzing them for clusters
I miss him so much
madison.com/news/local/obi…
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxFzp4WAAAO2Xh.jpg)
We got together and called ourselves an institution.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
"In mid-March, a corner of Queens suffered a sudden, sharp increase in the number of people with fever and trouble breathing, turning up mostly at one hospital's emergency room....
nytimes.com/2003/04/04/nyr…
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxKpJMXgAAPgd0.png)
"Congress is considering giving cities and states up to $425 million for "health surveillance." Still, public health experts say that would represent only a down payment on fixing what they describe as a woefully underfunded system"
washingtonpost.com/archive/politi…
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxM2mBXQAAIAzR.jpg)
The CDC even recognized it as a fundamental new tool in the arsenal of public health surveillance (these slides are classic CDC style BTW)
but trouble brewed
studylib.net/doc/15299385/o…
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxPWjDXgAE5llm.png)
I thought it was like Star Wars
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxRJPOX0AENVhu.png)
"it's not your job, you can't investigate, and your analysis sucks"
Ironically, my slides are in perfect accordance to the CDC stylebook
slideplayer.com/slide/15074208/
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxSgmnWAAECHwU.png)
funded by @polsiewski @SloanFoundation & @MarkleFdn (who were fighting similar battles on national security front) ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxUme5XgAAjEBB.png)
Look at this amazing visualization of flu across 8 jurisdictions currents.plos.org/influenza/arti…
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxXVgLXQAEIzzE.png)
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxX9-qWsAMMJhP.jpg)
"we propose a new model for analyzing data on populations, which takes distributed and dynamic access to information for granted without exposing the details of the underlying data"
healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.137…
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxZlPtXQAIGcZR.jpg)
We had the opportunity to set it up the right way now-and we did, kind of
But many health departments (informatics largely defunded a decade after 9/11) couldn't accept it
CA gave hospitals exemptions from the reporting requirement 🤦♀️
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUxdPiZXkAA5et7.png)
We have the answer