Lee Worden
The Professionals Cohort (California)
I'm an applied mathematician who has worked on evolutionary biology and cooperative social dynamics. For the last ten years or so I've been doing modeling of infectious disease transmission, most recently as per of Travis Porco's group in the Francis I. Proctor Foundation at UCSF, and I've been working on COVID since March 2020.
At first I was working on fairly complex models of the disease process, which we used to provide projections of hospital demand to local and state health departments for planning purposes.
While I'm still doing COVID-19 modeling research, I noticed that people were consistently asking for up-to-date estimates of the reproduction number in the Bay Area.
The reproduction number, referred to as R - the number of cases caused by a single case on average - is a summary of how strongly the outbreak is growing or shrinking, that can be used to evaluate how well control strategies are working.
Estimating reprodu…
