OUTBREAK: a user-friendly georeferencing online tool for disease surveillance

Biological research: BR

article

Arias-Carrasco, Raúl¹  Giddaluru, Jeevan²  Cardozo, Lucas E.²  Martins, Felipe²  Maracaja-Coutinho, Vinicius¹  Nakaya, Helder I.² 

[1] Advanced Center for Chronic Diseases – ACCDiS, Facultad de Ciencias Químicas y Farmacéuticas, Universidad de Chile;Department of Clinical and Toxicological Analyses, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of São Paulo;Instituto Vandique;Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein;Instituto Todos pela Saúde

关键词: Outbreak;    Pandemic;    Epidemiology;    Surveillance;    Georeferencing;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s40659-021-00343-5

来源: BioMed Central

【 摘 要 】

The current COVID-19 pandemic has already claimed more than 3.7 million victims and it will cause more deaths in the coming months. Tools that track the number and locations of cases are critical for surveillance and help in making policy decisions for controlling the outbreak. However, the current surveillance web-based dashboards run on proprietary platforms, which are often expensive and require specific computational knowledge. We developed a user-friendly web tool, named OUTBREAK, that facilitates epidemic surveillance by showing in an animated graph the timeline and geolocations of cases of an outbreak. It permits even non-specialist users to input data most conveniently and track outbreaks in real-time. We applied our tool to visualize the SARS 2003, MERS, and COVID19 epidemics, and provided them as examples on the website. Through the zoom feature, it is also possible to visualize cases at city and even neighborhood levels. We made the tool freely available at https://outbreak.sysbio.tools/ . OUTBREAK has the potential to guide and help health authorities to intervene and minimize the effects of outbreaks.

【 授权许可】

Unknown