RE: Apologies re link26 Sep 2020 14:37
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So we must foster boundary-spanning insights and innovation through groundbreaking collaborations across society and between sectors. This is why I am proud to have launched an initiative that brings together some of the worldβs best thinkers, promotes the use of advanced analytics, and enables unparalleled access to data that will help develop and drive solutions so that we can protect 1 billion more people from health emergencies. The Trinity Challenge fosters collaborations between organisations and individuals across sectors: it is a coalition of data science and public health where the outcomes and benefits will be made global and accessible to all. The founding members range from Microsoft to Imperial College London, from Tencent to Google, from GlaxoSmithKline to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
By tapping into the power of diverse data and insights, and focusing on the three key streams of identification, response and recovery, the Challenge seeks to bring about new ways to better predict and prevent outbreaks and improve the economic and social responses to health emergencies.
What solutions are we looking for? Imagine if we had an early warning system that could help us identify the medical, environmental or behavioural trends that indicated an impending health threat; for example, the analysis of sewage could have warned us about Covid-19 long before hospitals had been able to make any connections to the virus. The location, timing and type of emerging risk can all be better understood with the use of data. Likewise, there are also many insights we can take away from our own personal experiences of Covid-19, and with the help of behavioural science experts we can tell which intervention measures are most effective. We need to ask questions such as: what message, from what person, on what platform, at what time, means I will now wear a face mask? Finally, the frontier of new economic thinking can be applied to ensure that the road to recovery does not exacerbate existing inequality or levels of poverty in the process.
Humanity has the means to ensure that a pandemic like Covid-19, disrupting and destroying lives and livelihoods, never happens again. However, as Einstein warned us: βWe cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.β
This is a moment in history when we have a chance to think outside the box. We have not only the responsibility to do better but, for now at least, we have the opportunity.
β’ Sally Davies is master of Trinity College, Cambridge and a former chief medical officer for England