When the next pandemic emerges, what will the first few weeks look like?Will there be systems to identify contacts of other inflamed people and mix data to download very important data on the incubation period, disease severity, and effective measures?Or will there be fragmented knowledge and do improvised policies lead to giant epidemics and long restrictions?
Each outbreak has a feedback loop between perception and matrixTo design the most effective and least harmful emails, governments want to perceive where and how disease transmission occurs. Transmission measures, such as testing and contact tracing, in turn can provide more information. However, countries want to have difficult discussions about what it will take to get this information.
In early 2020, fitness officials knew where SARS-CoV-2 infections were or what measures would suppress transmission. As a result, many cities and countries have been blocked.
At the beginning of the pandemic, my colleagues and I reconstructed biased and incomplete global datasets. We combined cases reported in other countries with infections on repatriation flights to estimate the effect of the lockdown in Wuhan, China, where the virus appeared. We studied the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to extrapolate the severity of the infection. When we struggled with uncertainty, it was because the datasets had not been collected to answer our questions.
In March 2020, my colleagues at the London School of Hygiene
In some places, the behavior was analyzed at finer scales. In South Korea, cell phones and credit card data connected Americans to COVID-19 hotspots: Another 57,000 people who were close to an outbreak at a nightclub received text messages asking them to get a checkup. In Taiwan, cell phone tracing ensured that contacts of other inflamed people remained in quarantine. During the test events, Singapore recorded millions of Bluetooth sensors for social interactions.
The collection of this information is vital to evaluate control measures. The new projects will allow new diagnoses, remedies and vaccines to arrive even before the next pandemic. But countries will first have to make a decision on measures such as isolation, quarantine, mask orders and limits on social contacts.
To perceive the effectiveness of these measures, the researchers aligned the intervention schedule with the epidemic curves; however, very few particular studies have been designed for this purpose. Most of those that have occurred, such as the UK Events Research Programme, which looked at the threat of COVID-19 at in-person events in 2021, have been malnourished and inconclusive.
The design of the study could become crucial in the next pandemic. In 2020, the effects of the COVID-19 vaccine occurred temporarily when a momentary resurgence wave occurred at active test sites, so the evidence temporarily piled up. Such evidence will come more slowly in partially suppressed epidemics.
Since 2016, several researchers (including my collaborators) have contributed to the Blueprint R
Quantifying the characteristics of the virus, identifying other people who are at risk of becoming infected, and comparing the effectiveness of first measures, as well as vaccines, requires intelligent knowledge. And that requires making plans for how long-term knowledge systems can serve multiple functions. (It might not be imaginable to build a new infrastructure for every question. )There are examples of proactive knowledge flows to learn from. After the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Taiwan established the National Health Command Center, which it temporarily mobilized opposed COVID-19 in early 2020 employing knowledge-based measures ranging from virtual quarantine to triangulation of patient movements and tactile history. , adding cell phone location and card transactions, during a severe outbreak.
I have detected a conflict in the West when it comes to implementing data-intensive approaches. I’ve lost count of how many times someone has said that we copied East Asian responses, but once they hear the details, they conclude that those measures are an unacceptable invasion of privacy.
In the midst of a pandemic, it is time to discuss how to balance knowledge and confidentiality, or adapt controls and check designs. These are decisions that countries want to plan for now, before the next pandemic.
Nature 608, 649 (2022)
doi: https://doi. org/10. 1038/d41586-022-02268-9
From 2020 to 2022, A. K. is a member of the UK International Best Practice Advisory Group and the Pandemic Influenza Scientific Group on the Modelling Sub-Working Group of the UK Emergency Scientific Advisory Group.
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