Building an international consortium for tracking coronavirus health status
Eran Segal, Feng Zhang, […]Paul Wilmes
Nature Medicine (2020)
We call upon the research community to standardize efforts to use daily self-reported data about COVID-19 symptoms in the response to the pandemic and to form a collaborative consortium to maximize global gain while protecting participant privacy.
The rapid and global spread of COVID-19 led the World Health Organization to declare it a pandemic on 11 March 2020. One factor contributing to the spread of the pandemic is the lack of information about who is infected, in large part because of the lack of testing. This facilitated the silent spread of the causative coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), which led to delays in public-health and government responses and an explosion in cases. In countries that have tested more aggressively and that had the capacity to transparently share this data, such as South Korea and Singapore, the spread of disease has been greatly slowed1.
