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

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

A friend and colleague Dr. Long H. Nguyen of the Harvard Medical School and the Clinical & Translational Epidemiology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital has written about the new COronavirus Pandemic Epidemiology (COPE) consortium. As of May 2, 2020 2.8 million users have used the mobile application for symptom tracking. Also, as a side note, Dr. Long Nguyen knows the best vegan restaurants around any town he visits.

F2.large UK Maps.jpg

ABSTRACT: The rapid pace of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome COronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic presents challenges to the robust collection of population-scale data to address this global health crisis. We established the COronavirus Pandemic Epidemiology (COPE) consortium to bring together scientists with expertise in big data research and epidemiology to develop a COVID-19 Symptom Tracker mobile application that we launched in the UK on March 24, 2020 and the US on March 29, 2020 garnering more than 2.8 million users as of May 2, 2020. This mobile application offers data on risk factors, herald symptoms, clinical outcomes, and geographical hot spots. This initiative offers critical proof-of-concept for the repurposing of existing approaches to enable rapidly scalable epidemiologic data collection and analysis which is critical for a data-driven response to this public health challenge.

David A. Drew1,*, Long H. Nguyen1,*, Claire J. Steves2,3, Cristina Menni2, Maxim Freydin2, Thomas Varsavsky4, Carole H. Sudre4, M. Jorge Cardoso4, Sebastien Ourselin4, Jonathan Wolf5, Tim D. Spector2,5,†, Andrew T. Chan1,6,†,‡, COPE Consortium§

Corresponding author. Email: achan@mgh.harvard.edu

  1. Clinical & Translational Epidemiology Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 55 Fruit St., Boston, MA 02114, USA.

  2. Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology, King’s College London, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE17EH, UK.

  3. Department of Ageing and Health, Guys and St. Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE17EHIL, UK.

  4. School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London, 1 Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7EU, UK.

  5. Zoe Global Limited, 164 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE17RW, UK.

  6. Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 665 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02114, USA.

  1. ↵* These authors contributed equally to this work.

  2. ↵† These authors contributed equally to this work.

  • ↵§ COPE Consortium members and affiliations are listed in the supplementary materials.

Science  05 May 2020: eabc0473
DOI: 10.1126/science.abc0473