Getting Granular When Tracking Virus Trends

Predicting seasonal virus severity is a challenging, imperfect science. In the immediate years prior to the pandemic, incidence rates saw an increase. And in the main years of the pandemic, there was a significant downward trend.

Tracking influenza incidence trends is a significant annual assessment undertaken by public health officials, and their decisions provide key stakeholders information to decipher how to execute their prevention and treatment strategies when it comes to impending seasons. For example, deciphering what strains are most prevalent in the southern hemisphere leads to the types of flu vaccines that will be administered in the northern hemisphere influenza season.

However, these assessments have limitations as they traditionally do not collect much more information than incidence rates of strains and some epidemiology evidence. Part of the issue has been the dearth of granular data to help in making more informed decision-making. A company has developed a platform to gather more data and information as it relates to seasonal viruses.

Last month, the company, BlueDot, introduced its new influenza-like-illness (ILI) intelligence offering, which utilizes artificial and human intelligence to detect, assess, and respond to threats globally.

“It's really a package of different intelligence products,” Andrea Thomas, PhD, director of epidemiology, BlueDot, said. “One being data on indicator-based data like cases and deaths from official sources, but also, location based data on drivers of disease, such as population density, temperature data...that then our clients can actually pull directly through an API into their own applications or dashboards.”

In addition, they have a biweekly report, titled the ILI Pulse. This report is a compilation of timely information-based signals as well as official information.

Some of the other specific ILI offerings include:

• Early warning and expert assessment for high-consequence ILI activity
• Historical and annual cases and deaths
• ILI activity briefs to support risk communications and vaccination campaigns
• Global demographic, disease, and location drivers of burden
• Advanced warning of influenza seasons
• Rolling influenza forecasts for out-of-season and in-season activity

In addition, to dealing with seasonal viruses, the introduction of COVID-19 circulating around the world has prompted a permanent threat, according to Thomas. “We are not going back to 2019,” Thomas said, of the inclusion of COVID-19 as a continuous threat.

Thomas spoke to Contagion about tracking influenza, the possible mutation of strep A, and how climate change is influencing respiratory viruses.

To find out more about this offering, interested parties can go to BlueDot’s website.