In 2015, as the mosquito-borne virus Zika quickly spread through the Americas, travel bans and quarantines were issued, as well as calls to cancel the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. As the World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency, governments in affected countries needed a way to accurately predict the rates and locations of new infections. Because only 20 percent of Zika cases are symptomatic, it is a particularly challenging virus to predict.
In January 2016, the team at Northeastern University’s MoBS lab, with the support of the Center for Inference and Dynamics of Infectious Diseases, started the Zika Modeling Project to help public authorities and researchers better understand its evolution and spread.