Background

This report provides a brief summary of the weekly ensemble forecast for Texas from the COVID-19 Forecast Hub. In collaboration with the US CDC, our team aggregates COVID-19 forecasts from dozens of teams around the globe. Typically on Wednesday of each week, a summary of the week's forecasts from the COVID-19 Forecast Hub appear on the official CDC COVID-19 forecasting page.

Every week, teams submit their forecasts to the COVID-19 Forecast Hub.

Each Tuesday, we combine the most recent forecasts from each team into a single "ensemble" forecast of reported COVID-19 hospitalizations at the state and national level. As of February 20, 2023, we are no longer working with case forecasts, and as of March 6, 2023, we are no longer generating ensemble death forecasts. Older reports include case and death forecasts. At the moment, we only generate ensemble forecasts for up to four weeks into the future, as the available evidence suggests that models are less accurate at longer forecast horizons.

Weekly reports from the COVID-19 Forecast Hub can be found at this page.

COVID-19 Forecasts

Since the inputs to the ensemble model do not factor in changes in behavior or policy that could have an impact on short-term disease transmission (e.g. school openings or closures, new interventions, governmental policy shift, etc...), the ensemble model itself should not be looked to for specific answers to questions like "what will happen if or when schools open in 2 weeks" because most of the input models are not factoring in these changes. That said, the ensemble model has consistently shown strong predictive performance in predicting mortality, and very few of the many interventions put in place appear to have created dramatic changes in short-term disease transmission that would impact short-term trends in mortality.

This week, our ensemble combined forecasts for Texas from 13 different models.

During periods of relative stability, models in general show broad agreement about the predicted trajectory of the outbreak. However, when there are steep surges or declines, models often have quite different predictions for the upcoming weeks. The result is that there is increased uncertainty in the ensemble forecast, which can be seen as wider confidence intervals in the forecast visualization. You can explore the full set of models, including their forecasts for past weeks online at the Forecast Hub interactive visualization.

When interpreting probability of an increase, it's important to note that the increase or decrease is relative to the location-specific recent observed incidence, which varies across locations.

Hospitalizations

As of September 28, 2021 the ensemble forecast only reports 14 day ahead forecasts for hospitalizations, due to persistent large inaccuracies observed when forecasting beyond that.

The ensemble model predicts that COVID-19 daily hospitalizations will be between 93 and 107 hospitalizations daily. However for June 26, 2023, the ensemble shows substantial uncertainty, with COVID-19 daily hospitalizations between 30 and 224 deemed possible.

For state-level hospitalization forecasts made over the last 6 weeks in Texas for which observed data are now available, the 95% prediction intervals covered the truth 100% of the time, and the 50% prediction intervals covered the truth 61% of the time.

The sortable and searchable hospitalization table below shows the 7 day average hospitalization count and rate of reported COVID-19 hospitalization in the population (standardized per 100,000 population) over the last week (June 04, 2023 to June 10, 2023) and two weeks ahead (June 18, 2023 to June 24, 2023).

Methods & Acknowledgement

This report was reproducibly and dynamically generated using RMarkdown. The code for the report can be found here