Pharmageek

Health officials in San Francisco and Alameda counties have cut ties with Verily’s state-funded COVID testing sites amid concerns about data collection and privacy.

Source: khn.org

Traditional screening for COVID-19 typically includes survey questions about symptoms and travel history, as well as temperature measurements. Here, we explore whether personal sensor data collected over time may help identify subtle changes indicating an infection, such as in patients with COVID-19. We have developed a smartphone app that collects smartwatch and activity tracker data, as well as self-reported symptoms and diagnostic testing results, from individuals in the United States, and have assessed whether symptom and sensor data can differentiate COVID-19 positive versus negative cases in symptomatic individuals. We enrolled 30,529 participants between 25 March and 7 June 2020, of whom 3,811 reported symptoms. Of these symptomatic individuals, 54 reported testing positive and 279 negative for COVID-19. We found that a combination of symptom and sensor data resulted in an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.80 (interquartile range (IQR): 0.73–0.86) for discriminating between symptomatic individuals who were positive or negative for COVID-19, a performance that is significantly better (P < 0.01) than a model1 that considers symptoms alone (AUC = 0.71; IQR: 0.63–0.79). Such continuous, passively captured data may be complementary to virus testing, which is generally a one-off or infrequent sampling assay. A smartphone app that combines smartwatch and activity tracker data together with self-reported symptoms allows continuous monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Source: www.nature.com

We are all being exposed to a huge amount of COVID-19 information on a daily basis, and not all of it is reliable. Here are some tips for telling the difference and stopping the spread of misinformation.

Source: www.who.int

PARIS (TICpharma) - Si l'application de traçage des cas contacts TousAntiCovid était adoptée par 30% de la population, alors chaque personne se déclarant comme Covid+ dans l'application permettrait à 37% de ses contacts de ne pas retransmettre le virus, selon une modélisation mise en ligne le 22 octobre sur le site de l'EPIcx lab, dirigé par l'épidémiologiste Vittoria Colizza.

Source: www.ticpharma.com