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Pacifying A Pandemic With Numbers

Big Data’s Best And Brightest Join To Bring Better Solutions To The Clinic

 
• By William Looney

Powered by prominent global health philanthropies and the UK’s world-class collaborative capabilities in disease surveillance, the new International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA) is gearing up to address a crucial – and yet unanswered – policy question for public health:  can sharing data curated from a diversity of sources provide the hard evidence needed to improve patient outcomes against the virus – not just for today’s pandemic, but for future ones as well? Much will depend on a robust response from big pharma.

COVID-19 Data
• Source: Alamy

A key reveal from this past year of pandemic response is how timely, accurate and accessible data can inform and guide health system decision-making. Good data, effectively applied, can transform clinical outcomes. The UK’s recent RECOVERY (Randomized Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapies) trial is a case in point: it found that a common steroid drug, dexamethasone, although not effective in all patients, still reduced mortality by one-third for the sickest patients, providing an evidence-based alternative to costly hospitalizations.

Yet the converse is also true: 18 months into the pandemic, little data exists on the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions...

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• By Sushmita Panda

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