The World Health Organization (WHO) team announced that such activities will take place as part of the forthcoming open-source program office at the new Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence Center in Berlin, Germany.
“Such an approach will encourage greater ownership and equal access to Go.Data, compatible with mobile devices and in multiple languages, while ensuring sustainability and integration with existing health information infrastructures,” specified a statement from the body.
WHO epidemiologist Sara Hollis noted that governments in many countries must respond to multiple new or recurring outbreaks each year, sometimes with limited resources and almost always without warning, allowing them to act quickly and decisively when using software like Go.Data the signal is received.
First deployed in 2019 to respond to an outbreak of diphtheria among refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh and Ebola in the DRC and Uganda, use of this tool accelerated in 2020 as the volume and complexity of Covid -19 Increases in data generated led countries to seek to update old information management systems.
For epidemiologists, the visual representation of the chain of transmission created by Go.Data allows them to easily understand how the disease spreads: what activities, environments and types of interactions are associated with high or low rates of transmission, WHO explained.
The more it’s used, the stronger it gets, the statement said, as the growing Go.Data community shares local feedback and adjustments.
The core team behind the platform maintains a community of practice with open source resources that allow the broader community of engineers and developers to easily access solutions, adapt them to their own context, or contribute updates.
After gaining experience of using Go.Data to respond to Covid-19, many countries have already started using the tool to monitor other outbreaks such as measles in Brazil, the organization said.
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