How Data Can Manage Global Health Pandemics

The world is currently overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a respiratory disease which is supposedly originated in the city of Wuhan in China in the end of 2019. Pandemics have been a part of human history from ancient times through today. Pandemics is always characterized by fear, uncertainty, suddenness, panic and different degrees of stigma and deaths and have a devastating impact. Responding to a pandemic requires rigorous public health measures. The stricter the measures, the greater is the disruption of normal life, and more adverse is the economic impact. In addition, pandemics also has an impact on demography, social customs, culture, and religion.
We are currently living in a digital world and armed with sophisticated technology that can be used to leverage data and derive insights that can help in combating pandemic of a scale similar to COVID-19, in ways that was not possible in previous centuries.

Given the adverse impacts of pandemics and the havoc that COVID-19 has created, it is important that readers understand what a pandemic is, the related terms (such as epidemic, outbreak, super spreader and patient zero), origin of pandemics, the trajectory of a new disease, the butterfly effect of contagious diseases, factors that determine the pandemic potential of a disease, how to prepare for a pandemic and strategies to combat a pandemic at individual, community, organizational, national, and global level, the role of data, big data and analytics in preventing and combating a pandemic, pandemic myths, critical success factors in managing a pandemic and lessons learnt from pandemics with special reference to COVID-19.

This book entitled "A Data and Analytics Perspective on Global Pandemics: COVID-19 Case Study" provides guidance on these topics. While there are a few books on pandemics and COVID-19, role of technologies in pandemics, none of the books talk about all the above topics with special emphasis on data.

This book does not assume any prior or specialist knowledge in pandemics or related areas and will be highly beneficial to the scientific community, researchers, academicians, professors, policy makers and professionals across the domains of health, management, strategy and data, and even to the general public. This book is technology agnostic and contains a large number of illustrations making it easy for the readers to understand and relate to the concepts discussed in this book.