Vaccine effectiveness against emerging COVID-19 variants using digital health data.

Background: Participatory surveillance of self-reported symptoms and vaccination status can be used to supplement traditional public health surveillance and provide insights into vaccine effectiveness and changes in the symptoms produced by an infectious disease. The University of Maryland COVID Trends and Impact Survey provides an example of participatory surveillance that leveraged Facebook's active user base to provide self-reported symptom and vaccination data in near real-time.

Methods: Here, we develop a methodology for identifying changes in vaccine effectiveness and COVID-19 symptomatology using the University of Maryland COVID Trends and Impact Survey data from three middle-income countries (Guatemala, Mexico, and South Africa).

Decreased Seasonal Influenza Rates Detected in a Crowdsourced Influenza-Like Illness Surveillance System During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Prospective Cohort Study.

Background: Seasonal respiratory viruses had lower incidence during their 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 seasons, which overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic. The widespread implementation of precautionary measures to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has been seen to also mitigate transmission of seasonal influenza. The COVID-19 pandemic also led to changes in care seeking and access.

COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance and Uptake in Bangkok, Thailand: Cross-sectional Online Survey.

Background: The third most severe COVID-19 wave in the middle of 2021 coincided with the dual challenges of limited vaccine supply and lagging acceptance in Bangkok, Thailand. Understanding of persistent vaccine hesitancy during the "608" campaign to vaccinate those aged over 60 years and 8 medical risk groups was needed. On-the-ground surveys place further demands on resources and are scale limited.

Use of At-Home COVID-19 Tests - United States, August 23, 2021-March 12, 2022.

COVID-19 testing provides information regarding exposure and transmission risks, guides preventative measures (e.g., if and when to start and end isolation and quarantine), identifies opportunities for appropriate treatments, and helps assess disease prevalence (1).

Quantifying the effectiveness of betaherpesvirus-vectored transmissible vaccines.

Transmissible vaccines have the potential to revolutionize how zoonotic pathogens are controlled within wildlife reservoirs. A key challenge that must be overcome is identifying viral vectors that can rapidly spread immunity through a reservoir population. Because they are broadly distributed taxonomically, species specific, and stable to genetic manipulation, betaherpesviruses are leading candidates for use as transmissible vaccine vectors.

Global monitoring of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic through online surveys sampled from the Facebook user base.

Simultaneously tracking the global impact of COVID-19 is challenging because of regional variation in resources and reporting. Leveraging self-reported survey outcomes via an existing international social media network has the potential to provide standardized data streams to support monitoring and decision-making worldwide, in real time, and with limited local resources. The University of Maryland Global COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey (UMD-CTIS), in partnership with Facebook, has invited daily cross-sectional samples from the social media platform's active users to participate in the survey since its launch on April 23, 2020.

Bridging the gap: Using reservoir ecology and human serosurveys to estimate Lassa virus spillover in West Africa.

Forecasting the risk of pathogen spillover from reservoir populations of wild or domestic animals is essential for the effective deployment of interventions such as wildlife vaccination or culling. Due to the sporadic nature of spillover events and limited availability of data, developing and validating robust, spatially explicit, predictions is challenging. Recent efforts have begun to make progress in this direction by capitalizing on machine learning methodologies.

Transmissible vaccines in heterogeneous populations: Implications for vaccine design.

Transmissible vaccines may provide a promising solution for improving the control of infectious disease, particularly zoonotic pathogens with wildlife reservoirs. Although it is well known that heterogeneity in pathogen transmission impacts the spread of infectious disease, the effects of heterogeneity on vaccine transmission are largely unknown. Here we develop and analyze a mathematical model that quantifies the potential benefits of a transmissible vaccine in a population where transmission is heterogeneous between two subgroups.

Evaluating the promise of recombinant transmissible vaccines.

Transmissible vaccines have the potential to revolutionize infectious disease control by reducing the vaccination effort required to protect a population against a disease. Recent efforts to develop transmissible vaccines focus on recombinant transmissible vaccine designs (RTVs) because they pose reduced risk if intra-host evolution causes the vaccine to revert to its vector form. However, the shared antigenicity of the vaccine and vector may confer vaccine-immunity to hosts infected with the vector, thwarting the ability of the vaccine to spread through the population.