From the 100 Day Mission to 100 lines of software development: how to improve early outbreak analytics.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, considerable advances have been made to improve epidemic preparedness by accelerating diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccine development. However, we argue that it is crucial to make equivalent efforts in the field of outbreak analytics to help ensure reliable, evidence-based decision making. To explore the challenges and key priorities in the field of outbreak analytics, the Epiverse-TRACE initiative brought together a multidisciplinary group of experts, including field epidemiologists, data scientists, academics, and software engineers from public health institutions across multiple countries.

Toward optimal disease surveillance with graph-based active learning.

Tracking the spread of emerging pathogens is critical to the design of timely and effective public health responses. Policymakers face the challenge of allocating finite resources for testing and surveillance across locations, with the goal of maximizing the information obtained about the underlying trends in prevalence and incidence. We model this decision-making process as an iterative node classification problem on an undirected and unweighted graph, in which nodes represent locations and edges represent movement of infectious agents among them.

Systems analysis and improvement to optimize opioid use disorder care quality and continuity for patients exiting jail (SAIA-MOUD).

Background: Between 2012-2022 opioid-related overdose deaths in the United States, including Washington State, have risen dramatically. Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a complex, chronic, and criminalized illness with biological, environmental, and social causes. One-fifth of people with OUD have recent criminal-legal system involvement; > 50% pass through WA jails annually.

Dengue virus importation risks in Africa: a modelling study.

Background: Dengue is a significant global public health concern that poses a threat in Africa. Particularly, African countries are at risk of viral introductions through air travel connectivity with areas of South America and Asia in which explosive dengue outbreaks frequently occur. Limited reporting and diagnostic capacity hinder a comprehensive assessment of continent-wide transmission dynamics and deployment of surveillance strategies in Africa.