Keynote Presentation: After the Mandates End: Preparing for the Next COVID-19 Variant

The IHME COVID-19 Projection Model has been two years in the making, and this talk will share details on how it works and what it says about our current point in the COVID pandemic as well as what we might expect in the future.  We will review how the model brings together all available data, including case counts, hospitalizations, and COVID-19 deaths, and this can help us understand the impact of the waning of vaccine effectiveness at preventing infection and severe disease over time, the true excess mortality due to COVID over the last two years, and how the omicron variant has changed the course of the pandemic.  As we look to the future, a comprehensive model of where we are and how we have arrived here can also help us prepare for what is to come if and when a new variant emerges.