Public health responses

Integration of high-precision laboratory data and computational modeling to inform quantitative microbial risk assessments of pathogen transmission under various conditions within indoor environments.

Integration of high-precision laboratory data and computational modeling to inform quantitative microbial risk assessments of pathogen transmission under various conditions within indoor environments.

While COVID-19 is the most significant global pandemic in over 100 years, it is not likely to be the last. Global change and an increasingly interconnected world increase the likelihood of novel pathogen introduction, making it critical for researchers to use the current pandemic to inform our response and planning in the future.

With COVID-19 is surging throughout the state of Arizona, there is a need to easily and quickly reach a diverse and widespread population, with a special focus on rural areas and underrepresented minority groups.

Early detection of disease outbreaks is critical to the effective management of system resources within any community, especially during pandemics. Due to the current fragmentation of timely informational resources to initially identify outbreaks, a comprehensive digital platform for early surveillance monitoring within communities is required to rapidly inform healthcare, community leaders, policy makers and EMS systems. The model will learn from experience and will be able to simulate the effect of a change in any variable (e.g., community behavior or hospital response such as cancelling elective surgeries, expanded ICU, or alternate staffing models) on the outcomes of interest. The simulation can be developed into unique digital platforms for early surveillance monitoring within communities to inform healthcare, community leaders, policymakers, and EMS systems.

Monitoring of a community by partitioning it into several zones (15-20) can identify densely populated, high-risk buildings for infectious disease transmission (schools, nursing homes, prisons).

Recent viral outbreaks of preventable diseases, including SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), and increasing levels of vaccine hesitancy among populations with health disparities, highlight the need to develop and evaluate strategies to increase vaccine completion. Both logistical challenges and vaccine hesitancy influence this disparity.

Prevention and control measures for infectious diseases require community support to be successful. SARS-CoV-2 has made it eminently clear that community engagement in prevention is essential, and the need for trusted community partners to disseminate and be a reliable resource for science-based information is critical to this engagement—yet, processes to successfully obtain community buy-in and combat misinformation are poorly developed.