Building an International Consortium for Tracking Coronavirus Health Status

Abstract

Information is the most potent protective weapon we have to combat a pandemic, at both the individual and global level. For individuals, information can help us make personal decisions and provide a sense of security. For the global community, information can inform policy decisions and offer critical insights into the epidemic of COVID-19 disease. Fully leveraging the power of information, however, requires large amounts of data and access to it. To achieve this, we are making steps to form an international consortium, Coronavirus Census Collective (CCC, coronaviruscensuscollective.org), that will serve as a hub for integrating information from multiple data sources that can be utilized to understand, monitor, predict, and combat global pandemics. These sources may include self-reported health status through surveys (including mobile apps), results of diagnostic laboratory tests, and other static and real-time geospatial data. This collective effort to track and share information will be invaluable in predicting hotspots of disease outbreak, identifying which factors control the rate of spreading, informing immediate policy decisions, evaluating the effectiveness of measures taken by health organizations on pandemic control, and providing critical insight on the etiology of COVID-19. It will also help individuals stay informed on this rapidly evolving situation and contribute to other global efforts to slow the spread of disease. In the past few weeks, several initiatives across the globe have surfaced to use daily self-reported symptoms as a means to track disease spread, predict outbreak locations, guide population measures and help in the allocation of healthcare resources. The aim of this paper is to put out a call to standardize these efforts and spark a collaborative effort to maximize the global gain while protecting participant privacy.

Digital technologies in the public-health response to COVID-19

“…These data are not consistent and are not provided within the same timeframe, and there is no standard format or long-term commitment. Researcher-led international collaborations have aimed to aggregate multiple international data sources of voluntarily reported information 41,123 . Equally, governments should provide much greater transparency in their datasets, including epidemiological data and risk factors for acquisition, with downloadable formats for researchers.…”

Rapid implementation of mobile technology for real-time epidemiology of COVID-19

“…By leveraging the established digital backbone of an application used for personal nutrition studies, the COVID Symptom Tracker was launched in the UK on March 24, 2020, and became available in the U.S. on March 29, 2020 (https://covid.joinzoe.com/us). The COPE Consortium is committed to the shared international pursuit of combating COVID-19 and has worked with scientific collaborators and thought leaders in real-time epidemiology to prioritize data harmonization and sharing as a part of the Coronavirus Census Collective (17).…”

The COronavirus Pandemic Epidemiology (COPE) Consortium: A Call to Action

“…Similarly, we are committed to working together with similar data participatory infectious disease surveillance efforts in the U.S., (24,25) including collaborations with CovidNearYou and the HowWeFeel Project. (26) Although several other digital collection tools for COVID-19 symptoms have been launched in the U.S., these applications have largely been configured to offer a single assessment of symptoms to tailor recommendations for further evaluation. Others have been developed for researchers to report information on behalf of patients enrolled in clinical registries.…”