The writer is a science commentator
It would be unthinkable for a hurricane to hit the US without warning — or for modellers to be hurriedly convened only once the tempest had reached land. The National Weather Service is on permanent watch for these and other natural hazards, whose destructive paths can be predicted several days ahead of time using a mix of observational data and atmospheric modelling finessed over decades.
Now the US is setting up a forecasting service that aims to do for diseases what the weather service does for meteorology. The day after his inauguration, Joe Biden announced the creation of the National Centre for Epidemic Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics for “modernising global early warning and trigger systems for scaling action to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from emerging biological threats”.