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Coronavirus

As a new strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) swept through the world in 2020, preparedness plans, masking policies and more public policy changed just as quickly. WVXU has covered the pandemic's impact on the Tri-State from the very beginning, when on March 3, 2020, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine barred spectators from attending the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus over concerns about the virus, even though Ohio had yet to confirm a single case of COVID-19.

Medical Detectives Drill Down Into Coronavirus Data

91.7 WVXU | By Ann Thompson

Published March 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM EST

Kyle Martin, a worker at HealthMap, a system using artificial intelligence to monitor global disease outbreaks, mines health data to keep the system up to date in a work area at Boston Children's Hospital in Boston.

Health officials say figuring out the path of the coronavirus is key to controlling it. They have employed the help of spies, data scientists, epidemiologists and others to study who is likely to get COVID-19 and where it will travel next.

U.S. spy agencies are reportedly using undercover informants and eavesdropped electronicly to find out about the spread of the virus in Iran and India. Those are two countries the House Intelligence Committee learned Feb. 27 may not be taking the proper precautions.Iran has had the highest number of deathsoutside China and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has hinted at a cover-up.

Containing the spread is key to slowing down COVID-19 and the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are using a variety of surveillance systems to gather information. University of Cincinnati adjunct associate professor of environmental health Florence Fulk says that's important.

"Because from that you can start talking about prevention and also protecting those who are not ill," she says.

One mystery for U.S. investigators is how a California woman got the virus without traveling to areas where it is. The CDC is using "contact tracing" to figure out who came within six feet of her who may have been infected. Fulk says epidemiologists are kind of like medical detectives. They have to determine who is at risk so those people can be on guard.

She wonders, "Are men becoming more ill than women? Do people who already have another disease like diabetes or COPD become more susceptible to the illness? Having that information can help inform both community members about their own individual risk."

UC epidemiologist and statistician Florence Fulk.

There are resources. Fulk points to the CDC websitefor the most up-to-date information.

How Specific Can Tracking Be?

University of Virginia researchers are collecting data and have created interactive online dashboards where graphs show where the virus is, recorded symptoms, age groups affected and even how one case spread to others within a country. Fulk is keeping up with the latest researcher, even looking at Chinese maps as she trains future epidemiologists at UC.