[News]Big Data In The Time Of Coronavirus (COVID-19)
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COVID-19 has arrived with consequences that are grave and unsettling. We are seeing daily reports showing outbreak and fatality curves on a worldwide and country/city basis. Big Data lies at the heart of efforts to comprehend and forecast the impact that Coronavirus will have on all of us.
To better understand how Big Data is being employed to forecast and understand the reach and impact of Coronavirus, I spoke with Sy Pretorius, MD, who serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Medical & Scientific Officer for Parexel, a global provider of biopharmaceutical services that help transform scientific discoveries into new treatments. Parexel is one of the largest clinical research organizations in the world.
I spoke with Dr. Pretorius about how Big Data can help our understanding of COVID-19:
How are Big Data sets of massive amounts of epidemiological and scientific data enabling health workers, scientists, epidemiologists, and policy makers make more informed decisions in fighting coronavirus?
The near real-time COVID-19 trackers that continuously pull data from sources around the world are helping healthcare workers, scientists, epidemiologists and policymakers aggregate and synthesize incident data on a global basis.
There has been some interesting data resulting from GPS analyses of population movement by region, city, etc., which ultimately helps provide a view of the population’s compliance — or lack of compliance — with social-distancing mandates.
