Suchergebnisse

COVID-19 represents the most severe global crisis to date whose public conversation can be studied in real time. To do so, we use a data set of over 350 million tweets and retweets posted by over 26 million English speaking Twitter users from January 13 to June 7, 2020. We characterize the retweet network to identify spontaneous clustering of users and the evolution of their interaction over time in relation to the pandemic's emergence. We identify several stable clusters (super-communities), and are able to link them to international groups mainly involved in science and health topics, national elites, and political actors. The science- and health-related super-community received disproportionate attention early on during the pandemic, and was leading the discussion at the time. However, as the pandemic unfolded, the attention shifted towards both national elites and political actors, paralleled by the introduction of country-specific containment measures and the growing politicization of the debate. Scientific super-community remained present in the discussion, but experienced less reach and became more isolated within the network. Overall, the emerging network communities are characterized by an increased self-amplification and polarization. This makes it generally harder for information from international health organizations or scientific authorities to directly reach a broad audience through Twitter for prolonged time. These results may have implications for information dissemination along the unfolding of long-term events like epidemic diseases on a world-wide scale.

The evolution of computing and web technologies over the last decade enabled the development of fully-fledged scientific applications that run directly on web browsers. Powered by JavaScript, the lingua franca of web programming, these "web apps" are starting to revolutionize and democratize scientific research, education and outreach.

In the wake of the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), contact tracing has become a key element of strategies to control the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). Given the rapid and intense spread of SARS-CoV-2, digital contact tracing has emerged as a potential complementary tool to support containment and mitigation efforts. Early modelling studies highlighted the potential of digital contact tracing to break transmission chains, and Google and Apple subsequently developed the Exposure Notification (EN) framework, making it available to the vast majority of smartphones. A growing number of governments have launched or announced EN-based contact tracing apps, but their effectiveness remains unknown. Here, we report early findings of the digital contact tracing app deployment in Switzerland. We demonstrate proof-of-principle that digital contact tracing reaches exposed contacts, who then test positive for SARS-CoV-2. This indicates that digital contact tracing is an effective complementary tool for controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Continued technical improvement and international compatibility can further increase the efficacy, particularly also across country borders. ; ISSN:1424-7860 ; ISSN:1424-3997

In the wake of the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), contact tracing has become a key element of strategies to control the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). Given the rapid and intense spread of SARS-CoV-2, digital contact tracing has emerged as a potential complementary tool to support containment and mitigation efforts. Early modelling studies highlighted the potential of digital contact tracing to break transmission chains, and Google and Apple subsequently developed the Exposure Notification (EN) framework, making it available to the vast majority of smartphones. A growing number of governments have launched or announced EN-based contact tracing apps, but their effectiveness remains unknown. Here, we report early findings of the digital contact tracing app deployment in Switzerland. We demonstrate proof-of-principle that digital contact tracing reaches exposed contacts, who then test positive for SARS-CoV-2. This indicates that digital contact tracing is an effective complementary tool for controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Continued technical improvement and international compatibility can further increase the efficacy, particularly also across country borders.

With increased complexity in various global health challenges comes a need for increased precision and the adoption of more tailored health interventions. Building on precision public health, we propose precision global health (PGH), an approach that leverages life sciences, social sciences, and data sciences, augmented with artificial intelligence (AI), in order to identify transnational problems and deliver targeted and impactful interventions through integrated and participatory approaches. With more than four billion Internet users across the globe and the accelerating power of AI, PGH taps on our current augmented capacity to collect, integrate, analyse and visualise large volumes of data, both non-specific and specific to health. With the support of governments and donors, and together with international and non-governmental organisations, universities and research institutions can generate innovative solutions to improve health and wellbeing of the most vulnerable populations around the world. In line with the Sustainable Development Goals, we propose here a road map for the development and implementation of PGH.