Emerging data inputs for infectious diseases surveillance and decision making

Abstract

Infectious diseases create a significant health and social burden globally and can lead to outbreaks and epidemics. Timely surveillance for infectious diseases is required to inform both short and long term public responses and health policies. Novel data inputs for infectious disease surveillance and public health decision making are emerging, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These include the use of technology-enabled physiological measurements, crowd sourcing, field experiments, and artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies may provide benefits in relation to improved timeliness and reduced resource requirements in comparison to traditional methods. In this review paper, we describe current and emerging data inputs being used for infectious disease surveillance and summarize key benefits and limitations.

Community-Based Digital Contact Tracing of Emerging Infectious Diseases: Design and Implementation Study With Empirical COVID-19 Cases

“…With this detailed knowledge, the two factors, contact rate and transmission probability, embedded in the effective reproductive number can be minimized to forestall the outbreak of an EID such as COVID-19 in a community. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital contact tracing has been proposed and implemented in a variety of nations and regions [5,8,10,11,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. The implementation of contact tracing in the context of containment measures may vary from time to time, not only due to the transmissibility and severity of dominant COVID-19 variants of concern (VOCs) but also the availability of vaccines and antiviral therapies [24,25].…”

“…Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, various frameworks and methods for digital contact tracing have been developed [8,10,11,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. In addition to techniques aimed at enhancing the efficiency of identifying individuals at risk of infection owing to contact with pathogens, we have demonstrated a comprehensive strategy that integrates this information with traditional approaches.…”