Scientists at UMass Chan develop app to track COVID info in Central Mass.
Photo | Timothy Doyle
UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester
Scientists at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester have developed a web application which will allow researchers and public health officials to track variants and clinical information about COVID-19 in Central Massachusetts, the medical school said on Thursday.
“This is unique to Central Massachusetts,” geneticist Doyle Ward said in the school’s announcement. “Nobody else has COVID-19 information at this level of detail.”
Doyle developed the app with colleagues at the school, including Qiming Shi, the data scientist who built the application, called the University of Massachusetts’ Graphical user interface for Geographic Information, or MAGGI.
Researchers, along with UMass Memorial Health, obtained archive remnant COVID samples collected in clinical settings, according to UMass Chan, and then used sequencing technologies to identify the variants in each sample. They used data without identifying information, which allows the map to populate thousands of COVID-19 cases based on genetic subtypes.
The data includes social and clinical data to help researchers find patterns related to pandemic response, according to UMass Chan, including access to many different data points, including vaccine rates, age, gender, poverty rates, and other information.
Researchers believe the application could be replicated in areas outside of Central Massachusetts, to help scientists and public health officials track and respond to COVID’s spread.
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