  2014 Ebola outbreaks can offer lessons for the COVOID-19 and the ongoing
variant surveillance and the use of multi method approach to detect public
health preparedness. We are increasingly seeing a delay and disconnect of the
transmission of locally situated information to the hierarchical system for
making the overall preparedness and response more proactive than reactive for
dealing with emergencies such as 2014 Ebola. For our COVID-19, it is timely to
consider whether digital surveillance networks and support systems can be used
to bring the formal and community based ad hoc networks required for
facilitating the transmission of both strong (i.e., infections, confirmed
cases, deaths in hospital or clinic settings) and weak alters from the
community. This will allow timely detection of symptoms of isolated suspected
cases for making the overall surveillance and intervention strategy far more
effective. The use of digital surveillance networks can further contribute to
the development of global awareness of complex emergencies such as Ebola for
constructing information infrastructure required to develop, monitor and
analysis of community based global emergency surveillance in developed and
developing countries. In this study, a systematic analysis of the spread during
the months of March to October 2014 was performed using data from the Program
for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) and the Factiva database. Using
digital surveillance networks, we aim to draw network connections of
individuals/groups from a localized to a globalized transmission of Ebola using
reported suspected/probable/confirmed cases at different locations around the
world. We argue that public health preparedness and response can be
strengthened by understanding the social network connections between responders
(such as local health authorities) and spreaders (infected individuals and
groups).

Computers and Society