This project provides agent-based measles outbreak simulations across the 11 major U.S. cities hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup. With large international crowds expected, understanding the risk of measles transmission is critical for public-health preparedness.
The simulations are built on epiworldR and the measles R package, using census-derived age structure and MMR vaccination coverage. The current simulations represent baseline scenarios and do not yet model the additional mixing associated with the World Cup itself.
Atlanta · Boston · Dallas · Houston · Kansas City · Los Angeles · Miami · New York City · Philadelphia · San Francisco · Seattle
Age-structured ABM with census-derived mixing matrices and MMR vaccination coverage from CDC MMWR 2023–24.
U.S. population contact patterns are based on Epistorm-Mix, Litvinova et al.'s 2025 mapping of post-pandemic social contacts.
Each city runs 200 independent 60-day simulations. Probabilities reflect the fraction exceeding a given outbreak size.
MMR coverage from CDC's 2023–24 kindergarten vaccination survey, ranging from 88 % (Miami) to 97 % (New York City).
Looking for importation risk? See the companion dashboard: IDWC26 Importation Risk Dashboard ↗.
This project has been developed by University of Utah's ForeSITE Center as part of a collaboration across InsightNet centers — CDC-funded centers — as preparation for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. All the code is freely available at github.com/EpiForeSITE/idcup.
Risk labels summarize the probability of observing at least the listed number of cases by day 60.
| City | MMR coverage | Population | Seed cases † | Risk (≥10 cases) | Risk (≥20 cases) | Risk (≥50 cases) |
|---|
† Number of seed cases used to initialise each simulation. Estimated from current reported case counts from the Johns Hopkins U.S. Measles Data Repository. Cities with no reported cases were assigned a single seed case.
Found a bug, an inconsistency in the data, or something that doesn't look right? We welcome feedback and corrections from the community.
You can open a GitHub issue directly in the project repository, or send us an email. We aim to respond within a few business days.