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Dennis OConnor

Safety concerns with consumer-facing mobile health applications and their consequences:... - 0 views

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    Results Of the 74 studies identified, the majority were reviews of a single or a group of similar apps (n = 66, 89%), nearly half related to disease management (n = 34, 46%). A total of 80 safety concerns were identified, 67 related to the quality of information presented including incorrect or incomplete information, variation in content, and incorrect or inappropriate response to consumer needs. The remaining 13 related to app functionality including gaps in features, lack of validation for user input, delayed processing, failure to respond to health dangers, and faulty alarms. Of the 52 reports of actual or potential consequences, 5 had potential for patient harm. We also identified 66 reports about gaps in app development, including the lack of expert involvement, poor evidence base, and poor validation.
Dennis OConnor

Coronavirus Safety GuideAndrew Junkin, MD - Medium - 0 views

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    Coronavirus Safety Guide by Andrew Junkin, MD Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Harvard Medical School Boston, MA First published: March 23, 2020 | Last updated: May 3, 2020 This guide is also available in Spanish
Dennis OConnor

Frequency and Types of Patient-Reported Errors in Electronic Health Record Ambulatory C... - 0 views

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    Recommended by Tyler Orion: Conclusions and Relevance In this study, patients who read ambulatory notes online perceived mistakes, a substantial proportion of which they found to be serious. Older and sicker patients were twice as likely to report a serious error compared with younger and healthier patients, indicating important safety and quality implications. Sharing notes with patients may help engage them to improve record accuracy and health care safety together with practitioners. Meaning  As health information transparency increases, patients may perceive important errors in their visit notes, and inviting them to report mistakes that they believe are very serious may be associated with improved record accuracy and patient engagement in safety."
Dennis OConnor

CDC - Recommended Guidance for Extended Use and Limited Reuse of N95 Filtering Facepiec... - 0 views

  • This document recommends practices for extended use and limited reuse of NIOSH-certified N95 filtering facepiece respirators (commonly called “N95 respirators”). The recommendations are intended for use by professionals who manage respiratory protection programs in healthcare institutions to protect health care workers from job-related risks of exposure to infectious respiratory illnesses.
  • Minimize the number of individuals who need to use respiratory protection through the preferential use of engineering and administrative controls;
  • Use alternatives to N95 respirators (e.g., other classes of filtering facepiece respirators, elastomeric half-mask and full facepiece air purifying respirators, powered air purifying respirators) where feasible;
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  • mplement practices allowing extended use and/or limited reuse of N95 respirators, when acceptable; and
  • Prioritize the use of N95 respirators for those personnel at the highest risk of contracting or experiencing complications of infection.
  • Respirator Reuse Recommendations
  • There is no way of determining the maximum possible number of safe reuses for an N95 respirator as a generic number to be applied in all cases. Safe N95 reuse is affected by a number of variables that impact respirator function and contamination over time.
  • Risks of Extended Use and Reuse of Respirators
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    Recommended by Jessica Block
Dennis OConnor

The Rise of the New Bio-Citizen | Wilson Center - 0 views

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    Camille Nebeker: And another that my colleague, Eleanor wrote entitled the Rise of the New Bio-Citizen speaks to the need for governance and safety considerations when doing DIY research.
Dennis OConnor

No Pushing, no Shoving. Instead, Nudges in the Right Direction - 1 views

  • Nudges—and the technologies to deliver them—are becoming an increasingly important part of American healthcare. They are being used to keep patients safe, steer doctors and consumers to make more cost-effective decisions, and improve the quality of care.
  • behavioral economics, a field that combines economics with the psychology of making decisions.
  • help guide a stakeholder to a preferred option
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  • Nudging
  • (EHR) makes it relatively easy to use defaults and reminders to guide healthcare decisions.
  • behavioral “design team” embedded in health system
  • “There are opportunities to work through all of these mediums to align nudges with improved medical decision-making,” Patel says.
  • Because nudges can be very powerful, they need to be implemented carefully. “We focus on driving outcomes using national guidelines and evidence-based criteria,”
  • “Well-designed nudges based on clinical evidence make it easier for clinicians to effectively treat patients based on the latest evidence,”
  • In the realm of patient safety, “alarm fatigue” can set in so that safety alerts end up having the opposite of their intended effect
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    Recommended by Gina Soloperto: "Applying lessons from behavioral economics, health systems are using "nudges" to influence the choices clinicians make."
Dennis OConnor

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services | Facebook - 0 views

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    "Follow this page to share information that can benefit someone you know. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) touches the lives of nearly all Americans from research to food safety, health care, aging and much more."
Dennis OConnor

U.S. Food and Drug Administration | Facebook - 0 views

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    "Follow this page to share information that can benefit someone you know. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) touches the lives of nearly all Americans from research to food safety, health care, aging and much more."
Dennis OConnor

The Annual Compassion in Action Healthcare Conference | The Schwartz Center for Compass... - 0 views

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    Recommended by DeAunne Denmark MD PhD: Virtual Conference - On Demand - June 16 - November 17, 2020 A wide range of topics will be covered, but all relate to how compassionate care can support goals like workforce well-being, patient experience, safety, quality and innovation, as well as additional content to support caregivers and leaders during this challenging time.
Dennis OConnor

Empowering patients and reducing inequities: is there potential in sharing clinical not... - 0 views

  • engages them actively in their care, improves their sense of control over their health and enhances safety.
  • older, less educated, non-white or whose first language is not English report even greater benefits than do their counterparts
  • we suggest that open notes may, over time, prove important in the care of patients who are at risk of experiencing healthcare disparities.
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  • in the USA, the likelihood of receiving an access code to activate health portals is significantly lower for minorities, the uninsured, non-English speakers and older patients.11
  • Research suggests that negative implicit biases can affect the quality of health interactions and are associated with fewer signals of support and empathy towards patients representing some disadvantaged demographic groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, low-income, less educated and older patients.1
  • Open notes might be viewed as extending the visit, potentially thereby elongating and strengthening patient–physician interactions before and after the pressures of the clinical encounter.
  • investigators found that patients who were non-white or less educated reported more benefits than their counterparts:
  • Although some health organisations provide portals in a range of languages, clinical notes are typically offered in one language only.
  • access to open notes appears to help some patients who speak another primary language by allowing them, or a care partner, to read and recall information.
  • 77% (357/462) reported reading their notes as extremely important for remembering their care plan,
  • It is estimated that, on average, patients do not recall about half of the health information communicated during visits, with this figure likely higher among those with lower levels of health literacy.2
  • health literacy is now recognised as a driver of health disparities.
  • By offering patients access to records that document what was discussed during visits, open notes may provide a novel forum for augmenting health literacy among some patients.
  • As one patient noted: “I like my summaries because I can go back and revisit them”.1
  • in a large study of patients who read notes, 38% (8588/22 753) reported sharing them with others, predominantly family members
  • Limitations
  • Open notes are becoming increasingly common, and preliminary data suggest they may hold particular benefits for vulnerable patient populations
  • Second, as preliminary evidence suggests, it is possible that open notes may increase trust between patients and clinicians, reduce transmission of bias and increase patient engagement, especially among vulnerable patient populations
  • co-creation of medical notes holds promise and is currently under investigation
Dennis OConnor

Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here's How. - POLITICO - 0 views

  • Instead of asking, “Is there a reason to do this online?” we’ll be asking, “Is there any good reason to do this in person?”
  • saluting our doctors and nurses, genuflecting and saying, “Thank you for your service,”
  • give them guaranteed health benefits and corporate discounts
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  • it will force us to reconsider who we are and what we value, and, in the long run, it could help us rediscover the better version of ourselves.
  • has the potential to break America out of the 50-plus year pattern of escalating political and cultural polarization
  • the “common enemy” scenario, in which people begin to look past their differences when faced with a shared external threat
  • second reason is the “political shock wave” scenario
  • enduring relational patterns often become more susceptible to change after some type of major shock destabilizes them
  • now is the time to begin to promote more constructive patterns in our cultural and political discourse. The time for change is clearly ripening.
  • The COVID-19 crisis
  • has already forced people back to accepting that expertise matters.
  • move them back toward the idea that government is a matter for serious people.
  • the end of our romance with market society and hyper-individualism.
  • We could turn toward authoritarianism
  • reorient our politics and make substantial new investments in public goods—for health, especially—and public services.
  • to allowing partial homeschooling or online learning for K-12 kids has been swept away by necessity.
  • the social order it helps support—will collapse if the government doesn’t guarantee income for the millions of workers who will lose their jobs in a major recession or depression
  • de-militarization of American patriotism and love of community will be one of the benefits to come out of this whole awful mess.
  • But how do an Easter people observe their holiest day if they cannot rejoice together on Easter morning?
  • How do Jews celebrate their deliverance from bondage when Passover Seders must take place on Zoom
  • Can Muslim families celebrate Ramadan if they cannot visit local mosques for Tarawih prayers
  • All faiths have dealt with the challenge of keeping faith alive under the adverse conditions of war or diaspora or persecution—but never all faiths at the same time.
  • Contemplative practices may gain popularity
  • One group of Americans has lived through a transformational epidemic in recent memory: gay men. Of course, HIV/AIDS
  • Plagues drive change.
  • awakened us to the need for the protection of marriage
  • People are finding new ways to connect and support each other in adversity
  • demand major changes in the health-care system
  • COVID-19 will sweep away many of the artificial barriers to moving more of our lives online
  • uptake on genuinely useful online tools has been slowed by powerful legacy players,
  • collaboration with overcautious bureaucrats
  • Medicare allowing billing for telemedicine was a long-overdue change
  • s was revisiting HIPAA to permit more medical providers to use the same tools the rest of us use every day to communicate, such as Skype, Facetime and email.
  • The resistance
  • we will be better able to see how our fates are linked.
  • near-impossible to put that genie back in the bottle in the fall
  • college
  • forcing massive changes in a sector that has been ripe for innovation for a long time.
  • Once companies sort out their remote work dance steps, it will be harder—and more expensive—to deny employees those options.
  • Yo-Yo Ma
  • Perhaps we can use our time with our devices to rethink the kinds of community we can create through them
  • This is a different life on the screen from disappearing into a video game or polishing one’s avatar.
  • breaking open a medium with human generosity and empathy
  • Not only alone together, but together alone.
  • The rise of telemedicine
  • Out of necessity, remote office visits could skyrocket in popularity as traditional-care settings are overwhelmed by the pandemic
  • they’ve been forced to make impossible choices among their families, their health and financial ruin.
  • This crisis should unleash widespread political support for Universal Family Care
  • single public federal fund that we all contribute to, that we all benefit from, that helps us take care of our families while we work, from child care and elder care to support for people with disabilities and paid family leave.
  • potlight on unmet needs of the growing older population
  • The reality of fragile supply chains for active pharmaceutical ingredients coupled with public outrage over patent abuses that limit the availability of new treatments has led to an emerging, bipartisan consensus that the public sector must take far more active and direct responsibility for the development and manufacture of medicines.
  • resilient government approach will replace our failed, 40-year experiment with market-based incentives
  • Science reigns again.
  • Truth and its most popular emissary, science, have been declining in credibility for more than a generation
  • Quickly, however, Americans are being reacquainted with scientific concepts like germ theory and exponential growth
  • Unlike with tobacco use or climate change, science doubters will be able to see the impacts of the coronavirus immediately
  • for the next 35 years, I think we can expect that public respect for expertise in public health and epidemics to be at least partially restored
  • Congress can finally go virtual.
  • We need Congress to continue working through this crisis, but given advice to limit gatherings to 10 people or fewer, meeting on the floor of the House of Representatives is not an especially wise option right now
  • nstead, this is a great time for congresspeople to return to their districts and start the process of virtual legislating—permanently
  • Lawmakers will be closer to the voters they represent
  • sensitive to local perspectives and issues
  • A virtual Congress is harder to lobby
  • Party conformity also might loosen with representatives remembering local loyalties over party ties.
  • Big government makes a comeback.
  • Not only will America need a massive dose of big government
  • we will need big, and wise, government more than ever in its aftermath.
  • The widely accepted idea that government is inherently bad won’t persist after coronavirus.
  • functioning government is crucial for a healthy society
  • most people are desperately hoping
  • a rebirth of the patriotic honor of working for the government.
  • the coronavirus crisis might sow the seeds of a new civic federalism, in which states and localities become centers of justice, solidarity and far-sighted democratic problem-solving.
  • we will see that some communities handled the crisis much better than others.
  • success came in states where government, civic and private-sector leaders joined their strengths together in a spirit of self-sacrifice for the common good.
  • The coronavirus is this century’s most urgent challenge to humanity.
  • a new sense of solidarity, citizens of states
  • The rules we’ve lived by won’t all apply
  • pandemic has revealed a simple truth:
  • many policies that our elected officials have long told us were impossible and impractical were eminently possible and practical all along.
  • student loans and medical debt
  • evictions were avoidable; the homeless could’ve been housed
  • Trump has already put a freeze on interest for federal student loans
  • Governor Andrew Cuomo has paused all medical and student debt owed to New York State
  • Democrats and Republicans are discussing suspending collection on—or outright canceling—student loans as part of a larger economic stimulus package
  • It’s clear that in a crisis, the rules don’t apply
  • an unprecedented opportunity to not just hit the pause button and temporarily ease the pain, but to permanently change the rules so that untold millions of people aren’t so vulnerable to begin with.
  • Revived trust in institutions.
  • oronavirus pandemic, one hopes, will jolt Americans into a realization that the institutions and values Donald Trump has spent his presidency assailing are essential to the functioning of a democracy—and to its ability to grapple effectively with a national crisis.
  • government institutions
  • need to be staffed with experts (not political loyalists),
  • decisions need to be made through a reasoned policy process and predicated on evidence-based science and historical and geopolitical knowledge
  • we need to return to multilateral diplomacy,
  • to the understanding that co-operation with allies—and adversaries, too—is especially necessary when it comes to dealing with global problems like climate change and viral pandemics.
  • t public trust is crucial to governance
  • 1918 flu pandemic
  • the main lesson from that catastrophe is that “those in authority must retain the public’s trust” and “the way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.”
  • Expect a political uprising.
  • Occupy Wall Street 2.0, but this time much more massive and angrier.
  • Electronic voting goes mainstream.
  • how to allow for safe voting in the midst of a pandemic, the adoption of more advanced technology
  • To be clear, proven technologies now exist that offer mobile, at-home voting while still generating paper ballots.
  • This system is not an idea; it is a reality that has been used in more than 1,000 elections for nearly a decade by our overseas military and disabled voters.
  • hould be the new normal.
  • Election Day will become Election Month.
  • The change will come through expanded early voting and no-excuse mail-in balloting, effectively turning Election Day into Election Month
  • Once citizens experience the convenience of early voting and/or voting by mail, they won’t want to give it up.
  • . Some states, such as Washington, Oregon and Utah, already let everyone vote at home.
  • Voters already receive registration cards and elections guides by mail. Why not ballots?
  • First, every eligible voter should be mailed a ballot and a self-sealing return envelope with prepaid postage.
  • Elections administrators should receive extra resources to recruit younger poll workers, to ensure their and in-person voters’ health and safety, and to expand capacity to quickly and accurately process what will likely be an unprecedented volume of mail-in votes.
  • In the best-case scenario, the trauma of the pandemic will force society to accept restraints on mass consumer culture as a reasonable price to pay to defend ourselves against future contagions and climate disasters alike.
  • In the years ahead, however, expect to see more support from Democrats, Republicans, academics and diplomats for the notion that government has a much bigger role to play in creating adequate redundancy in supply chains—resilient even to trade shocks from allies. This will be a substantial reorientation from even the very recent past.
  • pressure on corporations to weigh the efficiency and costs/benefits of a globalized supply chain system against the robustness of a domestic-based supply chain.
  • other gap that has grown is between the top fifth and all the rest—and that gap will be exacerbated by this crisis.
  • In this crisis, most will earn steady incomes while having necessities delivered to their front doors.
  • other 80 percent of Americans lack that financial cushion.
  • will struggle
  • A hunger for diversion.
  • After the disastrous 1918-19 Spanish flu and the end of World War I, many Americans sought carefree entertainment, which the introduction of cars and the radio facilitated.
  • The economy quickly rebounded and flourished for about 10 years, until irrational investment tilted the United States and the world into the Great Depression.
  • human beings will respond with the same sense of relief and a search for community, relief from stress and pleasure.
  • Less communal dining—but maybe more cooking
  • many people will learn or relearn how to cook over the next weeks.
  • ikely there will be many fewer sit-down restaurants in Europe and the United States. We will be less communal at least for a while.
  • A revival of parks.
  • Urban parks—in which most major cities have made significant investments over the past decade—are big enough to accommodate both crowds and social distancing.
  • Society might come out of the pandemic valuing these big spaces even more,
  • A change in our understanding of ‘change.’
  • Americans have said goodbye to a society of frivolity and ceaseless activity in a flash
  • Our collective notions of the possible have changed already
  • The tyranny of habit no more.
  • Maybe, as in Camus’ time, it will take the dual specters of autocracy and disease to get us to listen to our common sense, our imaginations, our eccentricities—and not our programming.
  • and environmentally and physiologically devastating behaviors (including our favorites: driving cars, eating meat, burning electricity)
  • echarged commitment to a closer-to-the-bone worldview that recognizes we have a short time on earth
Dennis OConnor

Milasen: The drug that went from idea to injection in 10 months - 0 views

  • itting in freezer at Boston Children’s Hospital is a drug you won’t find anywhere else. It’s called milasen, and the 18 g that the hospital custom-ordered nearly 2 years ago should last for decades. That’s because milasen was designed to treat a single patient—a now 8-year-old girl named Mila Makovec. Milasen was built on decades of work on a class of drugs called antisense oligonucleotides. But after Boston Children’s Hospital scientist Timothy Yu diagnosed Mila with a never-before-seen genetic mutation, he took only 10 months to go from idea to injection. It’s a record-shattering sprint in the typical drug-development marathon, and an unprecedented degree of personalization for a chemical drug.
  • While the story of milasen could be seen as a template for other highly personalized drugs—what the field has come to call n-of-1 therapies—it also raises questions: Who should get these treatments? How will they be funded? And how will the US Food and Drug Administration regulate these projects?
  • Mila’s mom, Julia Vitarello, had started a group called Mila’s Miracle Foundation to raise money to develop a gene therapy for her daughter.
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  • Yu was intrigued. He reached out and offered to do whole-genome sequencing on Mila, her parents, and her younger brother.
  • Julia Vitarello, Mila's mother In March, Yu’s team found that a piece of DNA called a retrotransposon—the genetic remnants of viruses scattered throughout all of our genomes—had spontaneously inserted itself in the middle of a noncoding region of Mila’s CLN7 gene.
  • Black told Yu to renegotiate with the FDA. The 3-month safety study in rats, followed by another couple months to report the data, would take too long. After a letter from Vitarello outlining Mila’s decline, the FDA made a concession: Mila could get the drug after just 1 month of testing, so long as the rat studies continued to 3 months to understand any long-term toxicity.
  • Today, Mila continues to get injections of her drug approximately every 2 months. She used to have up to 30 seizures a day, each lasting more than a minute. Now, she only has a few a day, and they don’t last long,
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    "Sitting in freezer at Boston Children's Hospital is a drug you won't find anywhere else. It's called milasen, and the 18 g that the hospital custom-ordered nearly 2 years ago should last for decades. That's because milasen was designed to treat a single patient-a now 8-year-old girl named Mila Makovec. Milasen was built on decades of work on a class of drugs called antisense oligonucleotides. But after Boston Children's Hospital scientist Timothy Yu diagnosed Mila with a never-before-seen genetic mutation, he took only 10 months to go from idea to injection. It's a record-shattering sprint in the typical drug-development marathon, and an unprecedented degree of personalization for a chemical drug."
Dennis OConnor

National Institutes of Health (NIH) | Facebook - 0 views

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    "Follow this page to share information that can benefit someone you know. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) touches the lives of nearly all Americans from research to food safety, health care, aging and much more."
Dennis OConnor

CDC Global | Facebook - 0 views

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    "Follow this page to share information that can benefit someone you know. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) touches the lives of nearly all Americans from research to food safety, health care, aging and much more."
Dennis OConnor

Which Covid-19 Data Can You Trust? - 0 views

  • incomplete or incorrect data can also muddy the waters, obscuring important nuances within communities, ignoring important factors such as socioeconomic realities, and creating false senses of panic or safety, not to mention other harms such as needlessly exposing private information.
  • Right now, bad data could produce serious missteps with consequences for millions.
  • Whether you’re a CEO, a consultant, a policymaker, or just someone who is trying to make sense of what’s going on, it’s essential to be able to sort the good data from the misleading — or even misguided.
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  • common red flags
  • Data products that are too broad, too specific, or lack context.
  • Public health practitioners and data privacy experts rely on proportionality
  • only use the data that you absolutely need for the intended purpose and no more.
  • Even data at an appropriate spatial resolution must be interpreted with caution — context is key.
  • Simply presenting them, or interpreting them without a proper contextual understanding, could inadvertently lead to imposing or relaxing restrictions on lives and livelihoods, based on incomplete information.
  • The technologies behind the data are unvetted or have limited utility.
  • Both producers and consumers of outputs from these apps must understand where these can fall short.
  • In the absence of a tightly coupled testing and treatment plan, however, these apps risk either providing false reassurance to communities where infectious but asymptomatic individuals can continue to spread disease, or requiring an unreasonably large number of people to quarantine.
  • Some contact-tracing apps follow black-box algorithms, which preclude the global community of scientists from refining them or adopting them elsewhere.
  • These non-transparent, un-validated interventions — which are now being rolled out (or rolled back) in countries such as China, India, Israel and Vietnam — are in direct contravention to the open cross-border collaboration that scientists have adopted to address the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Models are produced and presented without appropriate expertise.
  • Epidemiological models that can help predict the burden and pattern of spread of Covid-19 rely on a number of parameters that are, as yet, wildly uncertain.
  • n the absence of reliable virological testing data, we cannot fit models accurately, or know confidently what the future of this epidemic will look like
  • and yet numbers are being presented to governments and the public with the appearance of certainty
  • Read Carefully and Trust Cautiously
  • Transparency: Look for how the data, technology, or recommendations are presented.
  • Thoughtfulness: Look for signs of hubris.
  • Example: Telenor
  • Expertise: Look for the professionals. Examine the credentials of those providing and processing the data.
  • Open Platforms: Look for the collaborators.
  • technology companies like Camber Systems, Cubeiq and Facebook have allowed scientists to examine their data,
  • The Covid-19 Mobility Data Network, of which we are part, comprises a voluntary collaboration of epidemiologists from around the world analyzes aggregated data from technology companies to provide daily insights to city and state officials from California to Dhaka, Bangladesh
  • This pandemic has been studied more intensely in a shorter amount of time than any other human event.
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    "This pandemic has been studied more intensely in a shorter amount of time than any other human event. Our globalized world has rapidly generated and shared a vast amount of information about it. It is inevitable that there will be bad as well as good data in that mix. These massive, decentralized, and crowd-sourced data can reliably be converted to life-saving knowledge if tempered by expertise, transparency, rigor, and collaboration. When making your own decisions, read closely, trust carefully, and when in doubt, look to the experts."
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