Who We Are
The Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched in 2022 to serve as a national resource to identify infectious disease threats, model their potential spread, and rapidly alert public health officials to improve decision-making during outbreak response.
CDC’s New National Resource for Better Outbreak Response
CFA expands both CDC’s and the nation’s ability to respond to emerging public health threats by providing modeling, forecasting, and advanced analytics quickly to leaders who make critical decisions during public health emergencies. CFA operates on three core priorities: the ability to (1) predict disease threats on the horizon, (2) inform partners, the public, and decision makers rapidly and effectively of data-driven outbreak analyses, and (3) innovate to advance the science and technology for disease forecasting and outbreak analysis.
Over the last year, CFA worked collaboratively with public, private, and global programs to bring together next-generation public health data, infectious disease modeling, rapid outbreak response, and high-quality communications to meet CDC’s 24/7 mission to save lives and protect people.
CFA accomplishes our mission guided by four core principles: Transparency, Impact, Equity, and Collaboration.
- CFA is committed to rapid communication and dissemination of data from CDC systems to decision makers—making an impact by informing response efforts when disease threats emerge.
- CFA works to promptly make data, analyses, models, and scientific methods available to the public and decision makers in human and machine-readable formats to foster transparency and inform action.
- CFA fosters a culture of innovation and collaboration with public, private, and government partners. These partnerships advance outbreak forecasting science and analytics to improve outbreak response.
- CDC and CFA work to promote health equity by using data to identify and track health disparities in outbreaks and inform policies to address them. To do this, CFA works with partners to provide access to outbreak forecasting and advanced analytics resources so that decision makers representing all populations and at all levels can make data-driven response decisions.
Useful Terms and Definitions
A mechanism for predicting health outcomes or events using reliable past and present data, information, and appropriate analytical tools.
Analyses that merge mathematical simulations, probabilities, and data to understand the spread of infectious diseases in populations, predict the course of an outbreak, and evaluate strategies to control spread.
Tools and methods used to collect, visualize, analyze, and report on outbreak data.