Policymakers have also come together to expand telehealth access and address the coronavirus outbreak. “It is important that our members feel safe and secure knowing that they are able to pursue the proper care and testing they need to protect their health during this time of concern,” Vincent Nelson, MD, president, medical affairs and interim chief medical officer at BCBSA said in the announcement.
Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) recently announced that its network of 36 independently owned BCBS companies will increase access to prescription drugs, enhanced telehealth, and other clinical support systems to combat the disease. Various players across the healthcare industry have bolstered their efforts to track and control the spread of COVID-19, mainly through increased telehealth services. We believe our efforts are crucial to help inform modelling efforts and control measures during the earliest stages of the outbreak.” “Given the popularity and impact of the dashboard to date, we plan to continue hosting and managing the tool throughout the entirety of the COVID-19 outbreak and to build out its capabilities to establish a standing tool to monitor and report on future outbreaks. “With the exception of Australia, Hong Kong, and Italy, the CSSE at Johns Hopkins University has reported newly infected countries ahead of WHO, with Hong Kong and Italy reported within hours of the corresponding WHO situation report,” researchers said. CSSE plans to continue to host the tool as the disease evolves. In an article published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, the team noted that the dashboard is particularly effective at documenting the timing of the first reported case of COVID-19 in new countries or regions. Before updating the dashboard, researchers confirm with organizations like the CDC, the China CDC (CCDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and city and state-level public health authorities. The team tracks multiple data sources to track new cases of coronavirus, including various Twitter feeds, online news services, and direct communication sent through the dashboard. For regions and countries outside mainland China, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau, CSSE manually updates case numbers throughout the day when new cases are identified. Every 15 minutes, DXY updates the cumulative case counts for all provinces in China as well as other affected countries and regions. DXY collects local media and government reports to provide COVID-19 cumulative case totals in near real-time at the province level in China and the country level otherwise. Researchers noted the primary data source for the visual dashboard is DXY, an online platform run by members of the Chinese medical community.
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As the outbreak continued to evolve, the manual reporting process became overwhelming, and CSSE adopted a semi-automated living data stream strategy. During this period, the team typically conducted updates twice a day, both morning and night. From January 22-31, CSSE collected and processed all data manually.
The dashboard reports cases at the province level in China city level in the US, Australia, and Canada and country level otherwise. All data collected and displayed is made freely available, initially as Google sheets but now in a GitHub repository, along with the feature layers of the dashboard. First publicly shared on January 22, 2020, the dashboard was created to offer providers, public health authorities, researchers, and the general public a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak. The Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University has developed an interactive, web-based dashboard that tracks real-time data on confirmed coronavirus cases, deaths, and recoveries for all affected countries. The interactive dashboard tracks reported cases of coronavirus using real-time data, enabling researchers and the public to monitor the outbreak as it unfolds. Johns Hopkins University - Coronavirus Interactive Dashboard Johns Hopkins Develops Real-Time Data Dashboard to Track Coronavirus.