Tracking the 2022 Monkeypox Outbreak: Completing Our 100 Days Mission
The Global.health (G.h) team completed a 100 days mission to provide decision-makers, researchers, and the public with timely and accurate, openly accessible global line-list data for the 2022 monkeypox (MPX) outbreak.
Within days of the first report of MPX in England, the G.h team quickly stood-up a MPX tracker using the G.h system design to collect and openly share line-list data through Google Sheets and a GitHub repository. Our international team of curators worked around the clock to provide timely updates, tackling challenges associated with building an emerging disease outbreak dataset in real-time. We discussed challenges in curation in our last blog post.
The G.h team has provided early situational awareness during a critical time in the outbreak, monitoring cases through the first 100 days. G.h connected disparate data sets into an open-access, standardized, public health digital data stream to help monitor the MPX outbreak status in near real-time. Our curation team constantly worked to enrich the dataset. Global or regional situation reports or country-level reporting from government sources could be supplemented with state & local public health information and news articles. As of 2022-09-21, we have logged at least 63,780 confirmed MPX cases in 112 countries/territories.
Figure [Daily Briefing Report]: Number of cumulative confirmed cases and number of countries/territories who have reported confirmed cases.
Now, we are at a point of transition. Our detailed coverage through the first 100 days provided time for public health leaders to coordinate their global response; we aim to complement, not replace, existing systems. Currently, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S. CDC) both produce and share daily MPX reports. On 2022-09-23, the G.h team will shift from providing manually curated line-list data to openly available data resources, compiling downloadable MPX datasets with aggregate case data from the WHO (global), the U.S. CDC (U.S. only), and also the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (EU/EEA only) through GitHub. G.h MPX line-list data, last updated 2022-09-22, will remain accessible to download through GitHub. Our team of engineers has been working to ensure a seamless transition with no impact to the data or user experience.
G.h demonstrated an agile tracking methodology and flexible system design and infrastructure that can be reproduced and scaled to support an emerging or re-emerging pathogen. Other leaders in public health have shared their 100 days missions in support of pandemic preparedness and response [e.g. the U.S. Government, CEPI, and the G7]. We can identify our roles, act with accountability, and work together towards a shared commitment to end pandemics before they start.
We thank our user community for their many helpful contributions and for identifying G.h as a trusted source of information. A list of research citations can be reviewed here. Questions? email us: info@global.health
Until the next post,
The G.h Team