COVID-19 – A Turning Point in Healthcare from a Human Data Science Perspective

Several issues have been revealed by the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic that we need to think about and address differently in the future. Indeed, we may see COVID-19 as a catalyst for positive change across a range of healthcare system issues that may have long been recognized but inadequately focused on or tackled. Many of these are at the intersection of human science and data science, and Human Data Science can provide innovative approaches and solutions in these areas, resulting in strengthened health systems and improved human health and wellness.

Though we are learning more about this pandemic every day, there is still so much uncertainty. Our current understanding of the clinical spectrum of COVID-19 infection is still limited, and the disease is still in many respects a mystery. We don’t know whether the COVID-19 pandemic is a temporary seasonal epidemic, similarly to the flu, or it is a new normal. There are many indications that the source of the coronavirus is of animal origin, but this is not fully confirmed. We don’t know exactly what impact transmission from asymptomatic people plays in spreading the disease. We don’t know the exact death rates of the coronavirus as not enough people have been tested, even though testing has increased. We also don’t have vaccines available to respond to this infection. And antivirals that are now being used on a compassionate basis to treat seriously ill patients have still not been proven effective for reducing mortality in randomized controlled clinical trials. Furthermore, most countries, governments and public health authorities have inadequate or weak response systems for epidemics such as the coronavirus and no country has been fully prepared.

Sadly, looking back in recent history, the current state of this coronavirus should not come as a surprise. There have been warnings from recent outbreaks, such as the SARS- and the MERS-epidemics, the Ebola-outbreak, and the inefficient responses to the regular, annual flu-epidemics.

For years, some scientists have repeatedly warned against “Disease X”, an unknown pandemic that one day would severely disrupt the global society. Five years ago, Bill Gates warned of a deadly pandemic and said that we wouldn’t be ready to handle it.

The COVID-19 pandemic has already wreaked severe havoc. From thousands of deaths worldwide, to major disruptions of supply chains, shutdown of businesses, and the risk of a global recession.

However, the biggest risk from the coronavirus is our ignorance and complacency. All key stakeholders – from physicians, researchers, public health officials, health system leaders, policy makers, the media and the general public – should take notice and learn from the COVID-19 epidemic. This will surely not be the last epidemic, and – even more concerning – there are a number of factors that point to such disease outbreaks becoming more likely in the future.

We need a seismic shift in how we prevent, prepare for, and manage pandemics such as the coronavirus.

Fundamentally, we need to look anew at the way we understand disease, the origins and vectors of pathogens, how they are transmitted, how we can prevent these diseases, what we can do to be better prepared to respond to threats from diseases, from securing functioning supply chains to having treatments and vaccines available at a much faster clip.

The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic is a major wake-up call to global society. The pandemic has exposed that we are ill-prepared to respond to global epidemics, that our health systems are deeply exposed due to gaps and weaknesses, and that we need better, interdisciplinary research and strategies for prevention, early intervention and action.

We need a new and different approach to research and human health – Human Data Science. Human Data Science is an emerging discipline, an integrated, multidimensional approach, which combines advances in human science with a deep understanding of the drivers of human health and enables the use of data science and technology in the prevention, response and management of disease outbreaks and other major challenges to health and healthcare.

The multidimensional, integrated, and interdisciplinary approach in Human Data Science is uniquely suited to address the complexity of infectious diseases, such as COVID-19.

A framework for applying Human Data Science in the context of COVID-19

This framework offers an approach to look holistically at many aspects regarding COVID-19 from a Human Data Science perspective, encompassing factors pertaining to Human Health, Human Science, and Data Science in an integrated, multidisciplinary manner.

Pandemics have no borders and our response must be ubiquitous, interconnected, and multidimensional.

From a Human Data Science perspective, there are some important learnings for both communicable and non-communicable, chronic diseases:

• We are woefully behind on the epidemiology of disease. In the flurry of efforts to understand, analyze and manage the current global pandemic, weaknesses have been disclosed in the lack of clear methodologies and international standards for tracking, understanding and navigating disease outbreaks. We are witnessing variations in the quality of reporting of patient cases, and a lack of clear definition of deaths from underlying conditions vs. deaths from COVID-19 as demonstrated in the absence in the case reports of excess death rates (EDRs) from the COVID-19 infections vs. baseline conditions. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a striking absence of historic memory of great epidemiological evidence. The vast majority of the learnings about the benefits of non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as social distancing measures, that have been painfully adopted during this pandemic were perfectly described and analyzed many years ago in the masterful study of “Nonpharmaceutical Interventions Implemented by US Cities During the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic” published in JAMA in 2007. The learnings from the 1918-19 flu pandemic are surprisingly relevant more than 100 hundred years later. However, the valuable historic knowledge from previous pandemics can be further augmented with the learnings from the current pandemic by using Human Data Science to combine the most recent knowledge in human science, such as molecular biology and genomics, with the understanding of human behavior and the insights from advanced digital technologies and predictive analytics that were not available 100 years ago.
• A pandemic pertaining to one pathogen should be analyzed in the context of the broader disease epidemiology. When assessing the exact impact of a pathogen, such as COVID-19, it is important to consider the excess death rate (EDR) from the disease against the baseline of diseases taking into account other diseases to determine the precise impact of the pathogen. This means ascertaining and separating what the impact is from COVID-19 versus the impact from other infectious diseases, such as, the common flu, pneumococcal infections and underlying chronic conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension and immune disorders.
• A global pandemic is not really simultaneously global - or even national, but emerges and moves in geographic clusters. While the entire world is impacted by COVID-19, the epidemic is not hitting with the same power simultaneously across the globe. The pandemic has now peaked in China where the epidemic started and is now also declining in South Korea. It appears to be peaking now in Italy at the same time as it is escalating in Spain and the United States. This means that the same measures are not relevant at the same time across all time-zones and geographies even as countries how to prevent the outbreak from reemerging. Furthermore, a one-size-fits-all approach is not meaningful across geographies that have different levels of impact.
• The power of societal mobilization is remarkable: The extraordinary impact of an entire society rising together to fight a serious enemy such as COVID-19 is a powerful reminder of what potentially could be achieved regarding other serious diseases. Imagine if society as a whole would step up to the plate and address the serious challenge of obesity and related co-morbidities, such as heart disease and diabetes, with the same commitment and intensity it is demonstrating against COVID-19. The impact from such a robust, concerted and broad societal mobilization could lead to significant prevention of life-threatening events related to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, such as heart attack, stroke and kidney failure.

For a more detailed analysis of the key learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic and for more resources on COVID-19 and its impact on the health ecosystem, visit the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science.