From Situational Awareness to Scientific Situational Awareness
Public health response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the need for situational awareness.1 In particular, scientific situational awareness is required to formulate science-informed policies. In public health emergency response, situational awareness typically comprises public health surveillance and laboratory testing data, but also includes information on relevant health or public health infrastructure, population data, and environmental exposure data that may be analyzed and displayed spatiotemporally.2 A general definition of scientific situational awareness, or awareness of the scientific information environment, may include monitoring citation databases and newer repositories such as preprint servers for publication of new findings and sharing relevant references within organizations or emergency response structures.3

In this commentary, we briefly describe ways in which the scientific information landscape has evolved in an accelerated manner during the COVID-19 pandemic and propose ways for individuals and organizations to maintain and contribute to enhanced scientific situational awareness as a means of responding to the COVID-19 infodemic. The current pandemic has seen the creation or accelerated use of new platforms or repositories for scientific data and information and new scientific publishing models and article forms, resulting in a mixture of new and old challenges to the integrity of available scientific information exchange forums. Examples of each category of novel or expanded scientific information resources follow.

The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic occurred after the rise of the internet. The decade since then has seen major trends in the digital world, such as the application of artificial intelligence and “big data” methodologies including machine learning to public health.4 The COVID-19 pandemic has been the first to fully leverage big data tools, for example, in the form of interactive dashboards that aggregate data and track various global metrics related to the pandemic. In addition to the widely used global case data dashboard created by a multidisciplinary team at Johns Hopkins University,5 newer dashboards track severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) seroprevalence studies6 and COVID-19 related clinical trials.7

References

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