Case Notes by Mitchell B. Weiss and Sarah Mehta: “By April 7, 2020, over 1.4 million people worldwide had contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Governments raced to curb the spread of COVID-19 by scaling up testing, quarantining those infected, and tracing their possible contacts. It had taken Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and Ministry of Health (MOH) all of eight weeks to develop the world’s first nationwide deployment of a Bluetooth-based contact tracing system, TraceTogether, and deploy it in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19. From late January to mid-March 2020, GovTech’s Jason Bay and his team raced to create a technology that would supplement the work of Singapore’s human contact tracers. Days after its launch, Singapore’s foreign minister announced plans to open source the technology. Now, in early April, TraceTogether was a beta for the world. Whether the system would really help in Singapore, and whether other countries should adopt it was still a wide-open question….(More)”.
A need for open public data standards and sharing in light of COVID-19
Lauren Gardner, Jeremy Ratcliff, Ensheng Dong and Aaron Katz at the Lancet: “The disjointed public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated one clear truth: the value of timely, publicly available data. The John Hopkins University (JHU) Center for Systems Science and Engineering’s COVID-19 dashboard exists to provide this information. What grew from a modest effort to track a novel cause of pneumonia in China quickly became a mainstay symbol of the pandemic, receiving over 1 billion hits per day within weeks of its creation, primarily driven by the general public seeking information on the emerging health crisis. Critically, the data supporting the visualisation were provided in a publicly accessible repository and eagerly adopted by policy makers and the research community for purposes of modelling and planning, as evidenced by the more than 1200 citations in the first 4 months of its publication. 6 months into the pandemic, the JHU COVID-19 dashboard still stands as the authoritative source of global COVID-19 epidemiological data.
Similar commendable efforts to facilitate public understanding of COVID-19 have since been introduced by various academic, industry, and public health entities. These costly and disparate efforts around the world were necessary to fill the gap left by the lack of an established infrastructure for real-time reporting and open data sharing during an ongoing public health crisis…
Although existing systems were in place to achieve such objectives, they were not empowered or equipped to fully meet the public’s expectation for timely open data at an actionable level of spatial resolution. Moving forward, it is imperative that a standardised reporting system for systematically collecting, visualising, and sharing high-quality data on emerging infectious and notifiable diseases in real-time is established. The data should be made available at a spatial and temporal scale that is granular enough to prove useful for planning and modelling purposes. Additionally, a critical component of the proposed system is the democratisation of data; all collected information (observing necessary privacy standards) should be made publicly available immediately upon release, in machine-readable formats, and based on open data standards..(More)”. (See also https://data4covid19.org/)
Coronavirus Compels Congress to Modernize Communication Techniques
Congressional Management Foundation: “The Future of Citizen Engagement: Coronavirus, Congress, and Constituent Communications” explores how Members of Congress and their staff engaged with citizens while navigating the constraints posed by COVID-19, and offers examples of how Congress can substantively connect with constituents using modern technology against the backdrop of a global pandemic.
The report addresses the following questions:
- How did congressional offices adapt their communications strategies to meet the immediate needs of their constituents during the onset of COVID-19?
- What techniques did Members use to diversify their constituent outreach?
- What methods of engagement is Congress using now, and likely to use in the future?
The findings are based on a survey of senior congressional staffers, comprising over 120 responses provided to CMF between May 26 and June 19, 2020. Additionally, CMF conducted 13 follow-up interviews with survey respondents who indicated they were willing to speak further about their office operations and constituent communications during COVID-19….(More)”.
Journalists’ guide to COVID data
Guide by RTDNA: “Watch a press conference, turn on a newscast, or overhear just about any phone conversation these days and you’ll hear mayors discussing R values, reporters announcing new fatalities and separated families comparing COVID case rolling averages in their counties. As coronavirus resurges across the country, medical data is no longer just the purview of epidemiologists (though a quick glance at any social media comments section shows an unlikely simultaneous surge in the number of virology experts and statisticians).
Journalists reporting on COVID, however, have a particular obligation to understand the data, to add context and to acknowledge uncertainty when reporting the numbers.
“Journalism requires more than merely reporting remarks, claims or comments. Journalism verifies, provides relevant context, tells the rest of the story and acknowledges the absence of important additional information.” – RTDNA Code of Ethics
This guide to common COVID metrics is designed to help journalists know how each data point is calculated, what it means and, importantly, what it doesn’t mean….(More)”.
Genomic Epidemiology Data Infrastructure Needs for SARS-CoV-2
Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “In December 2019, new cases of severe pneumonia were first detected in Wuhan, China, and the cause was determined to be a novel beta coronavirus related to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus that emerged from a bat reservoir in 2002. Within six months, this new virus—SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)—has spread worldwide, infecting at least 10 million people with an estimated 500,000 deaths. COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, was declared a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and a pandemic on March 11, 2020. To date, there is no approved effective treatment or vaccine for COVID-19, and it continues to spread in many countries.
Genomic Epidemiology Data Infrastructure Needs for SARS-CoV-2: Modernizing Pandemic Response Strategies lays out a framework to define and describe the data needs for a system to track and correlate viral genome sequences with clinical and epidemiological data. Such a system would help ensure the integration of data on viral evolution with detection, diagnostic, and countermeasure efforts. This report also explores data collection mechanisms to ensure a representative global sample set of all relevant extant sequences and considers challenges and opportunities for coordination across existing domestic, global, and regional data sources….(More)”.
Strengthening Privacy Protections in COVID-19 Mobile Phone–Enhanced Surveillance Programs
Rand Report: “Dozens of countries, including the United States, have been using mobile phone tools and data sources for COVID-19 surveillance activities, such as tracking infections and community spread, identifying populated areas at risk, and enforcing quarantine orders. These tools can augment traditional epidemiological interventions, such as contact tracing with technology-based data collection (e.g., automated signaling and record-keeping on mobile phone apps). As the response progresses, other beneficial technologies could include tools that authenticate those with low risk of contagion or that build community trust as stay-at-home orders are lifted.
However, the potential benefits that COVID-19 mobile phone–enhanced public health (“mobile”) surveillance program tools could provide are also accompanied by potential for harm. There are significant risks to citizens from the collection of sensitive data, including personal health, location, and contact data. People whose personal information is being collected might worry about who will receive the data, how those recipients might use the data, how the data might be shared with other entities, and what measures will be taken to safeguard the data from theft or abuse.
The risk of privacy violations can also impact government accountability and public trust. The possibility that one’s privacy will be violated by government officials or technology companies might dissuade citizens from getting tested for COVID-19, downloading public health–oriented mobile phone apps, or sharing symptom or location data. More broadly, real or perceived privacy violations might discourage citizens from believing government messaging or complying with government orders regarding COVID-19.
As U.S. public health agencies consider COVID-19-related mobile surveillance programs, they will need to address privacy concerns to encourage broad uptake and protect against privacy harms. Otherwise, COVID-19 mobile surveillance programs likely will be ineffective and the data collected unrepresentative of the situation on the ground….(More)“.
Digital technologies in the public-health response to COVID-19
Paper by Jobie Budd et al in Nature Medicine: “Digital technologies are being harnessed to support the public-health response to COVID-19 worldwide, including population surveillance, case identification, contact tracing and evaluation of interventions on the basis of mobility data and communication with the public. These rapid responses leverage billions of mobile phones, large online datasets, connected devices, relatively low-cost computing resources and advances in machine learning and natural language processing. This Review aims to capture the breadth of digital innovations for the public-health response to COVID-19 worldwide and their limitations, and barriers to their implementation, including legal, ethical and privacy barriers, as well as organizational and workforce barriers. The future of public health is likely to become increasingly digital, and we review the need for the alignment of international strategies for the regulation, evaluation and use of digital technologies to strengthen pandemic management, and future preparedness for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases….(More)”.
The Ethics of Pandemics
Book edited by Meredith Celene Schwartz: “The rapid spread of COVID-19 has had an unprecedented impact on modern health-care systems and has given rise to a number of complex ethical issues. This collection of readings and case studies offers an overview of some of the most pressing of these issues, such as the allocation of ventilators and other scarce resources, the curtailing of standard privacy measures for the sake of public health, and the potential obligations of health-care professionals to continue operating in dangerous work environments….(More)“.
Coming Together While Staying Apart : Facilitating Collective Action through Trust and Social Connection in the Age of COVID-19
Worldbank Report: “Facing the COVID-19 pandemic requires an unprecedented degree of cooperation between governments and citizens and across all facets of society to implement spatial distancing and other policy measures. This paper proposes to think about handling the pandemic as a collective action problem that can be alleviated by policies that foster trust and social connection. Policy and institutional recommendations are presented according to a three-layered pandemic response generally corresponding to short-, medium-, and long-term needs. This paper focuses on building connection and cooperation as means to bring about better health and socioeconomic outcomes. Many factors outside the paper’s scope, such as health policy choices, will greatly affect the outcomes. As such, the paper explores the role of trust, communication, and collaboration conditional on sound health and economic policy choices…(More)”.
Cities, crowding, and the coronavirus: Predicting contagion risk hotspots
Paper by Gaurav Bhardwaj et al: “Today, over 4 billion people around the world—more than half the global population—live in cities. By 2050, with the urban population more than doubling its current size, nearly 7 of 10 people in the world will live in cities. Evidence from today’s developed countries and rapidly emerging economies shows that urbanization and the development of cities is a source of dynamism that can lead to enhanced productivity. In fact, no country in the industrial age has ever achieved significant economic growth without urbanization.
The underlying driver of this dynamism is the ability of cities to bring people together. Social and economic interactions are the hallmark of city life, making people more productive and often creating a vibrant market for innovations by entrepreneurs and investors. International evidence suggests that the elasticity of income per capita with respect to city population is between 3% and 8% (Rosenthal & Strange 2003). Each doubling of city size raises its productivity by 5%.
But the coronavirus pandemic is now seriously limiting social interactions. With no vaccine available, prevention through containment and social distancing, along with frequent handwashing, appear to be, for now, the only viable strategies against the virus. The goal is to slow transmission and avoid overwhelming health systems that have finite resources. Hence non-essential businesses have been closed and social distancing measures, including lockdowns, are being applied in many countries. Will such measures defeat the virus in dense urban areas? In principle, yes. Wealthier people in dense neighborhoods can isolate themselves while having amenities and groceries delivered to them. Many can connect remotely to work, and some can even afford to live without working for a time. But poorer residents of crowded neighborhoods cannot afford such luxuries.
To help city leaders prioritize resources towards places with the highest exposure and contagion risk, we have developed a simple methodology that can be rapidly deployed. This methodology identifies hotspots for contagion and vulnerability, based on:
– The practical inability for keeping people apart, based on a combination of population density and livable floor space that does not allow for 2 meters of physical distancing.
– Conditions where, even under lockdown, people might have little option but to cluster (e.g., to access public toilets and water pumps)…(More)”.