Johns Hopkins varsity joins hand to build new tools to understand asymptomatic spread of Covid-19

The Johns Hopkins University professor behind the popular COVID-19 tracking map is joining scientists at Scripps Research and UCLA to develop new methods for understanding how and why the current coronavirus and future pandemics spread.

Hyderabad: At a time when the world’s several research organisations have been at the forefront in the battle against the novel coronavirus, America's Johns Hopkins University has joined hands to develop new methods for understanding how and why the current coronavirus and future pandemics spread.

The varsity's professor, Dr Lauren Gardner who developed the world-famous COVID-19 tracking map, is going to join scientists at Scripps Research and UCLA to develop new methods to know the exact reason of COVID-19’s rapid spread.

According to reports, the scientists' team is planning to construct massive databases of international airline traffic, worldwide weather patterns, national demographics, and genomic information from infected patients and use them to develop statistical models that could reveal patterns explaining COVID-19’s rapid spread.

Building online visualizations could better inform the public and national leaders about how complex systems around the world interact to fuel outbreaks of infectious diseases. The team hopes that national governments could use the tools to improve their responses to COVID-19 and minimize future outbreaks, reports said.

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Speaking about the ongoing research work, Lauren Gardner said, “The overarching objective of this project is to improve our general understanding of how infectious diseases spread, and why they impact populations differently.”

“We will develop new methodologies to explain COVID-19 transmission and spreading risk, accounting for various factors including genomics, mobility, climate, land use, population demographics and epidemiological data,” said Gardner.

The project has won a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health and will be led by Kristian Andersen, an immunology and microbiology professor at Scripps Research.

“The problem is that existing tools for analyzing infectious diseases can’t see how all of these factors are interconnected,” Andersen said.

“Not only will this allow us to understand whether certain public health measures are working, but it also will help predict how the disease could spread under different circumstances,” said, Marc Suchard, the third collaborator and professor of biostatistics and human genetics at UCLA.

Earlier, Gardner, the Johns Hopkins civil and systems engineering professor has developed the world-famous COVID-19 tracking map. With her, Anderson and others use that data to look for mutations, or slight changes in genetic sequence, that show how the virus moved from person to person.

Notably, the team intends to tap and map genomic data from virus genomes sequenced from COVID-19 patients that are collected and shared openly on research databases.

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