Recently, says the study’s lead author, Emmanuéle Délot, Ph.D., a faculty of studies at the National Institute of Child Research, she and her colleagues sought knowledge about sexual differences between patients with COVID-19 internationally for a new study. However, he says, when they verified the data in other countries, they discovered an unexpected lack of coherence, not only for gender-damaged knowledge, but also for any type of clinical or demographic data.
“Customers locating the same types of formats that would allow us to aggregate data, or even the same types of data on other sites, were lousy,” says Dr. Delot.
At the intensity of this problem, she and her colleagues at Children’s National, adding Eric Vilain, MD, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor James A. Clark of Molecular Genetics and Director of the Children’s National Center for Genetic Medicine Research, and Jonathan LoTempio, a doctoral candidate in a joint program with Children’s National and George Washington University, studied and analyzed knowledge about COVID-19.
The covered knowledge reported through public fitness agencies in countries heavily affected by COVID-19, efforts by percentage of knowledge on viral genome sequences and knowledge presented in publications and preprints.
At the time of the study, the 15 countries with the highest COVID-19 load at the time included the United States, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Turkey, Iran, China, Russia, Brazil, Belgium, Canada. , Holland and Switzerland. Together, these countries accounted for more than 75% of the reported global cases. The study team examined the knowledge of COVID-19 presented on the country’s Institute of Public Health’s online page, first examined the panels that many provided for a quick review of key knowledge, and then delved into other knowledge about the disease presented in other ways.
The content of the knowledge they found, says LoTempio, incredibly heterogeneous. For example, while the maximum number of countries continued to generate totals on instances and deaths shown, the availability of other types of knowledge, such as the number of tests performed, clinical facets of the disease such as comorities, symptoms or admission to extensive care, or demographic knowledge of patient information, such as age or gender, differed significantly from country to country.
Furthermore, the format in which the knowledge was presented lacked coherence between these institutes. Among the 15 countries, knowledge was presented in plain text, HTML or PDF. Eleven presented an interactive knowledge board on the Internet, and seven had the comma-separated knowledge to download them. These formats are not compatible with each other, LoTempio explains, and there was little or no documentation on where the knowledge provided by certain formats was archived, such as frequently updated Internet dashboards.
Dr Vilain says that a physically powerful formula is already in a position to allow for the uniform exchange of knowledge on influenza genomes – the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Influenza Exchange Initiative (GISAID) – which has been seamlessly adapted for the virus caused by COVID -19 and has already helped advance some types of research. However, he says, countries want to paint in combination to expand a similar formula to harmonize the exchange of other types of knowledge for COVID-19. The authors of the study proposed that knowledge of COVID-19 be shared among countries in a standardized format and standardized content, informed through the good luck of GISAID and supported through WHO.
In addition, the authors say, the explosion of studies on COVID-19 will be organized through experts able to navigate the thousands of published articles on this disease since the pandemic began to identify meritorious studies and assistance to fuse clinical and fundamental science.