| How Satellite data can help with COVID-19 and beyond - 18/03/2020 |
| Planet |
| TELECOM/ICT Operators and Service Providers | International |
| Planet is working with the United Nations, governments, other international health actors and technical partners. High-quality geospatial data enables dynamic and statistical models to provide setting-specific characterization of disease transmission, risk factors and forecasts of pathogen prevalence. “High-quality geospatial data enables dynamic and statistical models to provide setting-specific characterization of disease transmission, risk factors and forecasts of pathogen prevalence,” notes our colleague Josh L. Proctor, principal scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling in Seattle. “This is particularly true in low-and-middle income countries, when there is often a lack of high-fidelity, electronic health record systems.” Once the dynamics of a disease are modeled and understood, satellite imagery can be used to monitor places where it is more likely to emerge, or to look for the prevalence of certain risk-factors. For example, many novel viral illnesses, like SARS, MERS and the current COVID-19 coronavirus are zoonotic—so-called because they jump between animals and humans. Around 60 percent of all human diseases and around 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. One way to detect where new zoonotic illnesses like COVID-19 might arise is to monitor those places where human beings either directly or indirectly come into contact with wildlife. Often, this happens where human beings are changing the landscape, turning forests into pasture land for animals or fields for agriculture. As humans continue to squeeze the habitats of wild animals, the possibility increases that a virus found, for instance, in bats or birds, will migrate either directly to human beings or indirectly to us through our livestock. We can observe where human beings are changing the land in this way from space. Satellite monitoring of land-use change is used to target public health surveillance today. |
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Source Link Keywords: geospatial data |