COVID-19 GPH|Home|PHGKB

COVID-19 GPH|Home|PHGKB

 Spotlight

A call for diagnostic tests to report viral load
RF Service, Science, October 2, 2020

Diagnostic tests for COVID-19 should report not just whether a person is positive, but also a number known as the cycle threshold (CT) value, which indicates how much virus an infected person harbors. Advocates point to new research indicating that CT values could help doctors flag patients at high risk for serious disease. Recent findings also suggest the numbers could help officials determine who is infectious and should therefore be isolated and have their contacts tracked down.

Social license for the use of big data in the COVID-19 era
JA Shaw et al, NPJ Digital Medicine, October 2, 2020

In this Comment, we outline the importance of earning social license for public approval of big data initiatives, and specify principles of data law and data governance practices that can promote social license. We provide illustrative examples from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Widening the gap: greater racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 burden after accounting for missing race/ethnicity data
K Labgold et al, MEDRXIV, September 30, 2020

After bias-adjustment, the magnitude of the absolute racial/ethnic disparity, measured as the difference in infection rates between classified Black and Hispanic persons compared to classified White persons, increased 1.3-fold and 1.6-fold respectively. These results highlight that complete case analyses may underestimate absolute disparities in infection rates.

Alexa, do I have COVID-19?
E AnNthes, Nature News, September 30, 2020

Researchers are exploring ways to use people’s voices to diagnose coronavirus infections, dementia, depression and much more.