The World Health Organization (WHO) team announced that such an activity will be conducted under the Open-Source Program Office within the new Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence Center in Berlin, Germany.

“Such an approach will promote greater ownership and equitable access to Go.Data toll, compatible with mobile devices and in multiple languages, while guaranteeing sustainability and integration within standing health info infrastructures,” according to WHO.

WHO Emergency Event Response Epidemiologist Dr. Sara Hollis noted that a great number of governments must annually respond to several new or repeated outbreaks, sometimes with limited resources and almost always without warning of what is coming. Therefore, software like Go.Data, can act quickly and decisively as soon as the warning signal is received.

First used in 2019 to respond to a diphtheria outbreak among refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda, the use of this new tool accelerated in 2020, as the volume and complexity of Covid-19 data forced nations to strive to update old information management systems.

Epidemiologists say the visual representation of the transmission chain created by Go.Data allows them to easily understand how the disease spreads: which activities, environments and types of interaction are linked to high or low transmission rates, WHO detailed.

The more it’s used, the stronger it gets, the statement said, as the growing Go.Data community shares local feedback and adaptations.

The core team behind the platform keeps a community of practice with open-source resources, allowing the broader community of technicians and developers to easily have access to solutions, adapt them to their own context, or even contribute to updates.

After gaining experience by using Go.Data to respond to Covid-19, a great number of nations has already started off by using the new tool to monitor other outbreaks, such as measles in Brazil, WHO said.

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