AMHERST — A University of Massachusetts biostatistician was chosen alongside 20 global experts in infectious disease and pandemic forecasting to participate in a White House Coronavirus Task Force webinar Wednesday.
Nicholas Reich, as associate professor at UMass and director of the university-based Flu Forecasting Center of Excellence, will work with the group of experts using modeling to gain insight on the possible effects of efforts to mitigate the spead of the new virus.
Last fall, Reich was awarded up to $3 million over the next five years to operate the Flu Forecasting Center of Excellence — just one of two such Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facilities in the country, alongside another at Carnegie Mellon University — to expand flu forecasting research and its accessibility.
Reich’s flu forecasting collaborative “has produced some of the world’s most accurate models in recent years,” according to the university.
Reich could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Along with postdoctoral researcher Thomas McAndrew, Reich has surveyed more than 20 disease modeling researchers weekly to present their collaborative projections of how the COVID-19 outbreak will progress in the United States.
He is also the co-author of a study that calculates COVID-19 as having a median incubation period — the time between when a person contracts the virus and when symptoms appear — of just over five days, and that 97.5 percent of people who show symptoms will become symptomatic within 11.5 days of becoming infected.
Jacquelyn Voghel can be reached at jvoghel@gazettenet.com.