A new COVID-19 global surveillance system is able to track not just where the virus is now, but where it is going, how fast it will arrive, and whether the speed is accelerating. The new surveillance system being rolled out in 195 countries can also track the virus in states, in metropolitan areas, and in Canadian provinces.
Existing surveillance has not changed much in 50 years and is able to measure the caseload in terms of new and cumulative deaths and infections. However, up to now, the data doesn’t identify significant shifts in the pandemic or sound the alarm when disease transmission accelerates to signal an outbreak.
“We can easily identify outbreaks at their beginning and then know how fast they are moving” said Lori Post, Co-Lead and Director of the Center for Health Policy and Economics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu
Co-lead authors James Oshmke of Northwestern, and Charles Moss of the University of Florida https://ufl.edu developed the novel surveillance system. As reported by Lori Post, “We are picking up the dynamic characteristics of the pandemic, Pandemics move around and change and we need to inform public health leaders when there are significant shifts to the pandemic.”
Northwestern’s dashboard for the new COVID tracking system named GlobAl Sars-Co-2 Surveillance Project (GASSP) https://sites.northwestern.edu/covidglobalsurveillance/478-21) is open to everyone. Each country’s dashboard will be monitored in every U.S embassy in the world to inform policy leaders around the globe. Users will have metrics of the whole world at their fingertips.
The global surveillance app analyzes the virus in the same way that the field of economics measures the expansion and contraction of the economy. “The methods used are tried and tested, but this is the first time, they are being applied to disease surveillance. So far, the model and metrics validated for medical surveillance are published so we know they work,” according to Lori Post.
The U.S Agency for International Development (USDA) https://www.usaid.gov is funding the information for developing countries in the dashboard and Davee Innovations Research Endowment is funding the information for developed nations.
Information on the new system and the first U.S Surveillance Report was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research https://www.jmir.org on December 3, 2020.