Monitoring online media reports for early detection of unknown diseases: Insight from a retrospective study of COVID-19 emergence.

Sarah Valentin,Alizé Mercier,Elena Arsevska,Renaud Lancelot,Mathieu Roche

doi:10.1111/tbed.13738

Abstract

Event‐based surveillance (EBS) systems monitor a broad range of information sources to detect early signals of disease emergence, including new and unknown diseases. In December 2019, a newly identified coronavirus emerged in Wuhan (China), causing a global coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) pandemic. A retrospective study was conducted to evaluate the capacity of three event‐based surveillance (EBS) systems (ProMED, HealthMap and PADI‐web) to detect early COVID‐19 emergence signals. We focused on changes in online news vocabulary over the period before/after the identification of COVID‐19, while also assessing its contagiousness and pandemic potential. ProMED was the timeliest EBS, detecting signals one day before the official notification. At this early stage, the specific vocabulary used was related to ‘pneumonia symptoms’ and ‘mystery illness’. Once COVID‐19 was identified, the vocabulary changed to virus family and specific COVID‐19 acronyms. Our results suggest that the three EBS systems are complementary regarding data sources, and all require timeliness improvements. EBS methods should be adapted to the different stages of disease emergence to enhance early detection of future unknown disease outbreaks.

Highlights

Epidemic intelligence (EI) aims to detect, monitor and assess potential health threats for early warning and rapid response (Paquet, Coulombier, Kaiser, & Ciotti, 2006)
Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases is a human-curated system that was launched by the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) in 1994
We focused on PADI-web to understand how an animal health event-based surveillance (EBS) system contributed to the detection of a human emerging infectious diseases (EIDs)

Summary

Introduction

Epidemic intelligence (EI) aims to detect, monitor and assess potential health threats for early warning and rapid response (Paquet, Coulombier, Kaiser, & Ciotti, 2006). EBS uses unstructured data from unofficial sources such as online news to improve early detection of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). Several free-access EBS systems have been supporting epidemic intelligence since the late 1990s, such as the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED; Woodall, 2001), HealthMap (Brownstein, Freifeld, Reis, & Mandl, 2008) and the recently developed PADI-web (Valentin, Arsevska, et al, 2020).

Results

Conclusion