As I sat on one of the last emergency flights from Bangkok to Sydney, listening to people spluttering and coughing around the cabin, I asked myself, do the authorities have any real idea of how many Coronavirus cases there could actually be right now? Do they know how many people, and where, are starting to present Coronavirus symptoms? Do they have any idea of the age distribution of these people? And it struck me that, while this is a medical crisis, it’s also an information crisis.
There’s a good saying that ‘information is the oil of the 21st century’. It means that when armed with the right information, at the right time, decision makers are capable of getting better outcomes. As a data scientist, it’s been my job to empower managers in the corporate world with the insights they need, but never have I seen a problem in such dire need of information and insight as Coronavirus. This is largely due to the unique characteristics of the virus, like how subjects can be infected without presenting symptoms, and further exacerbated by the shortage of testing kits available.
Looking forward, in the absence of a Coronavirus vaccine, one idea for how to overcome the virus is that at some point our populations will need to achieve something called ‘herd immunity’ in order for the virus to eventually die off. It’s the same idea that underpins how modern vaccines work — that if a critical percentage of the population recovers from the virus (and is thereby immune), community transmission of the virus becomes untenable. However at the heart of the challenge to minimise the virus’ impact is the idea that authorities also desperately need to ‘flatten the curve’ to keep the burden on the healthcare system under control and reduce loss of life.
The challenge for authorities is that these are conflicting objectives. On the one hand, to reduce the economic damage from the virus, the authorities would like to reach herd immunity sooner rather than later which involves letting the virus spread quickly. Britain has been accused of adopting this approach too brashly which could risk considerable loss of life in the process. Whereas on the other extreme, to completely eliminate the risk of loss of life, we would all commit to never leave our homes again, which obviously isn’t practical either. So far, the advice from different international authorities has seemed to chiefly adopt either of these two approaches. But is there another way?
Ideally, to strike a balance between reducing both the health and economic impacts of the virus, governments could try to control the spread of the virus in a way such as to effectively utilise healthcare resources while also shortening the time to achieve herd immunity. You could think of this approach as ‘flatten the curve to closely meet the healthcare system’. Now, that sounds amazing, but also somewhat unrealistic.. So, is it possible?
To my mind (and I want to stress that this is an opinion piece and I am not an epidemiologist or medical professional), the biggest barrier to fighting this crisis is the information gap that governments have at their fingertips. Knowledge of the number of ‘confirmed cases’ is ultimately useless if it can’t inform an accurate, real time assessment of the number of true cases (cases that exist, whether confirmed via testing or not), since it is the number of true cases combined with distancing techniques that will ultimately dictate the speed of the spread of the virus. So, the critical information gap right now is to know (or at least estimate) the true number of Coronavirus cases in the community.
If this were known with some moderate degree of error, the government could in theory calibrate their recommended distancing measures to balance the number of estimated cases throughout the ongoing progression of the virus, and thereby effectively utilise the healthcare system. There are a lot of ‘ifs’ here, however my assertion is that with clearer, real time health information, better decisions could be made.
But how could this information be solicited from so many people? One idea is a simple Corona ‘self report’ survey application or web-tool. The tool would require participants to enter their email, age, postcode, temperature (if known), and a checkbox for symptoms like dry cough to be completed on a daily basis. Such information would arm the authorities with critical information to estimate the true current status of the virus, as well as the progression of the virus, and enable them to move from a reactive state to a proactive state of control. With high enough response rates, authorities would have a good foundation for extrapolating the medical conditions of the respondents into the general population.
In order to encourage high response rates, and given the criticality of this information to combat the virus, the government could link citizens’ relief packages to the daily completion of the survey.
What do you think? Does it sound like something you’d support? Comment below.
Again (and I really can’t say this enough) I’m no viral expert — these are just my thoughts on the crises at its current state.
