Soporte de decisiones frente al COVID-19: reporte de una experiencia interdisciplinaria

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic produced unprecedented changes in our society, leading to the need of tools for the prompt response to the problems linked to its spread. During the early months of 2020, many scientists adapted their activities and committed to the study and analysis of COVID-19 data. These initiatives produced tools to help at alleviating the effects of the pandemic. Here we describe the experience of an interdisciplinary group on the development of data oriented decision support tools. These tools were offered and partially used to analyse the spread of the virus in Argentina. Through diverse approaches and working remotely, we produced tools for loading and maintaining epidemiologic data. In these tasks we applied data science, informatics and administration methodologies. We aimed at validating the information made public by the health authorities. Thus, we designed and offered an agile and safe resource for data ingestion to the health system. We also implemented and analysed epidemic models, which were adapted to propose alternative scenarios. The models are open and accompanied with interactive visualisation tools. Finally, we discuss the role of science in applied problems of general interest.