Use and development of software for COVID-19 pandemic mitigation
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Software for COVID-19 pandemic mitigation takes many forms. It includes
mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...
s for contact tracing and
notifications Notification may refer to: * Notification (Holy See), an announcement by a department of the Roman Curia *Casualty notification, the process of notifying relatives of people who have been killed or seriously injured * Death notification, the proc ...
about infection risks, vaccine passports, software for enabling – or improving the effectiveness of – lockdowns and social distancing, Web software for the creation of related information services, and research and development software. A common issue is that few apps interoperate, reducing their effectiveness.


Contact tracing


Design

Design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design'' ...
decisions relate to issues such as privacy, data-storage and security. Apps are generally not interoperable.


Use

Voluntary use by the public was ineffective. A lack of features and bugs further reduced usefulness. Some apps include "check-ins" that enable exposure notifications when entering public venues such as fitness centres. One such example is the We-Care project that used anonymity and crowdsourced information about which check-ins are essential, to alert exposed users.


Digital vaccination certificates

Digital vaccine passports and vaccination certificates use software for verifying vaccination status. Such certificates were used to regulate access to events, buildings and services such as airplanes, concert venues and
health club A health club (also known as a fitness club, fitness center, health spa, and commonly referred to as a gym) is a place that houses exercise equipment for the purpose of physical exercise. In recent years, the number of fitness and health se ...
s and travel across borders.


Hurdles

Given the uneven distribution of vaccines across jurisdictions, granting privileges based on vaccination status certification means that those with easier vaccine access have unfair access to those privileges. If vaccination status is only verifiable using digital technology, those without that technology may also lose access even if they are vaccinated. Such privileging mechanisms may exacerbate inequality, increase risks of deliberate infections or transmission, Public health justifications for restricting behavior based on vaccine status have become less frequent over the course of the pandemic as vaccines do not stop transmission.


Design

Some teams are developing interoperable solutions, but this is not common. Governments express concerns over
data sovereignty Data sovereignty is the idea that data are subject to the laws and governance structures of the nation where they are collected. The concept of data sovereignty is closely linked with data security, cloud computing, network sovereignty and technol ...
. WHO established a "working group focused on establishing standards for a common architecture for a digital smart vaccination certificate to support vaccine(s) against COVID-19 and other immunizations". The COVID-19 Credentials Initiative hosted by Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) is a global initiative working to develop and deploy privacy-preserving, tamper-evident and verifiable credential certification projects based on the open standard Verifiable Credentials (VCs). Laurin Weissinger argued that it is important for such software to be fully
free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
, to clarify concepts and designs, to have it tested by security experts and to describe data that is collected and how it is used to build trust. Jenny Wanger contended that it is essential for such software to be open source. Jay Stanley affirmed this notion and warned that an "architecture that is not good for transparency, privacy, or user control" could set a "bad standard" for future credentialing systems.


Websites

Web dashboards are widely used for tracking the status of the pandemic. The Wikimedia project Scholia provides a graphical interface around data in Wikidata – such as literature about a specific coronavirus protein – to help with research, research-analysis, data interoperability, applications, updates, and data-mining. A group of online archivists used
open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
PHP- and Linux-based shadow library Sci-Hub to create an archive of over 5000 articles about
coronavirus Coronaviruses are a group of related RNA viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans and birds, they cause respiratory tract infections that can range from mild to lethal. Mild illnesses in humans include some cases of the com ...
es. Making the archive openly accessible is currently illegal. Sci-Hub provides free full access for most scientific pandemic publications. Multiple scientific publishers created open access portals, including the
Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press A university press is an academic publishing hou ...
, the Europe branch of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, ''
The Lancet ''The Lancet'' is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal and one of the oldest of its kind. It is also the world's highest-impact academic journal. It was founded in England in 1823. The journal publishes original research articles, ...
'',
John Wiley and Sons John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley (), is an American multinational publishing company founded in 1807 that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, in p ...
, and
Springer Nature Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macm ...
.


Medical software


GNU Health

The open source, Qt- and GTK-based GNU Health offer a variety of default features for use during pandemics. It allows parties to pool efforts on a single, integrated program – instead of individual, programs for specific purposes. Existing features include a way for making clinical information available and update it in any health institution via a globally unique "Person Universal ID". It includes lab test templates and functionalities, digital signing and encryption.


Vaccination management

Software helps manage vaccine distribution, including verifying the cold chain, and to record vaccination events.


Screening

In China, Web-technologies were used to direct individuals to appropriate resources. Infrared thermal cameras are used to detect individuals with fever. Machine learning has been used for diagnosis and risk prediction.


Quarantining

Electronic monitoring has been used to manage quarantine adherence.Furthermore, various software designs may threaten civil liberties and infringe on privacy. China informs individuals about whether and how long they must quarantine via a phone app and informs authorities about their compliance.


Genomic data

Nextstrain is an open source platform for pathogen genomic data such as about viral evolution and was used for research about novel variants.


Vaccine production

Software has been used in leaks and industrial espionage of vaccine-related data.
Machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...
has been applied to improve vaccine manufacturing productivity.


Modelling

Software models and simulations for SARS-CoV-2, including spread, functional mechanisms and properties, efficacy of potential treatments,
transmission Transmission may refer to: Medicine, science and technology * Power transmission ** Electric power transmission ** Propulsion transmission, technology allowing controlled application of power *** Automatic transmission *** Manual transmission *** ...
risks, vaccination modelling/monitoring, (
computational fluid dynamics Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems that involve fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required to simulate th ...
,
computational epidemiology Computational epidemiology is a multidisciplinary field that uses techniques from computer science, mathematics, geographic information science and public health to better understand issues central to epidemiology such as the spread of diseases or ...
,
computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...
/
computational systems biology Modelling biological systems is a significant task of systems biology and mathematical biology. Computational systems biology aims to develop and use efficient algorithms, data structures, visualization and communication tools with the goal of com ...
were developed by governments, universities, and companies. Modelling software and related software is also used to evaluate impacts on the environment and the
economy An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the ...
.


Distributed computing

The volunteer
distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...
project Folding@home simulates
protein folding Protein folding is the physical process by which a protein chain is translated to its native three-dimensional structure, typically a "folded" conformation by which the protein becomes biologically functional. Via an expeditious and reproduci ...
. It was used for medical research. In March 2020 it became the world's first system to reach one exaFLOPS and reached approximately 2.43 x86 exaFLOPS by 13 April 2020 many times faster than
Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topography, topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used ...
, the fastest
supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...
of that time. That month Rosetta@home joined the effort. Researchers announced that Rosetta@home allowed them to "accurately predict the atomic-scale structure of an important coronavirus protein weeks before it could be measured in the lab." In May 2020, the OpenPandemics—COVID-19 partnership was launched between Scripps Research and IBM's
World Community Grid World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and adding ...
. The partnership is a distributed computing project that "will automatically run a simulated experiment in the background
f connected home PCs F, or f, is the sixth Letter (alphabet), letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is English alphabet#Let ...
that will help predict the efficacy of a particular chemical compound as a potential treatment for
COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...
."


Drug repurposing research and drug development

Supercomputers – including Summit and Fugaku – have been used to explore potential treatments by running simulations with data on already-approved medications. Two early examples of supercomputer consortia are: * The
United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...
,
National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
,
NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
, industry, and nine universities pooled resources to access supercomputers from IBM, combined with cloud computing resources from
Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States. HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the H ...
,
Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...
,
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
, and
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
, for drug discovery. The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium attempted to forecast disease spread, model vaccines, and screen thousands of chemical compounds. The Consortium had used 437 peta
FLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...
of computing power by May 2020. * The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, an additional consortium of Microsoft, six universities (including MIT), and the
National Center for Supercomputer Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a ...
in Illinois, working under the auspices of artificial intelligence software company C3.ai pooled supercomputer resources toward drug discovery, medical protocol development and public health strategy improvement, as well as awarding grants for similar purposes.


See also

* Timeline of computing 2020–2029 * Pandemic prevention#Surveillance and mapping *
COVID-19 surveillance COVID-19 surveillance involves monitoring the spread of the coronavirus disease in order to establish the patterns of disease progression. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends active surveillance, with focus of case finding, testing a ...
* Teamwork **
Open-source software development Open-source software development (OSSD) is the process by which open-source software, or similar software whose source code is publicly available, is developed by an open-source software project. These are software products available with its sourc ...
** Citizen science#COVID-19 pandemic *
Information management Information management (IM) concerns a cycle of organizational activity: the acquisition of information from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that information to those who need it, and its ultimate disposal throug ...
** COVID-19 pandemic#Information dissemination *
Open-source ventilator An open-source ventilator is a disaster-situation ventilator made using a freely licensed ( open-source) design, and ideally, freely available components and parts ( open-source hardware). Designs, components, and parts may be anywhere from com ...
*
Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...
* Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on science and technology#Computing and machine learning research and citizen science * Public health mitigation of COVID-19#Information technology * Technology policy


References


External links

* , a scientific review for an overview of how IT applications could be used during the COVID-19 outbreak and
pandemic A pandemic () is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. A widespread endemic (epidemiology), endemic disease wi ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:COVID-19 pandemic mitigation software use and development Emergency management software