Leveraging an Online Dashboard to Inform on Infectious Disease Surveillance: A case Study of COVID-19 in Kenya.

Abstract

A multi-pronged approach to combating the COVID-19 pandemic in Kenya resulted in the formation of multidisciplinary research initiatives including genomic sequencing, syndromic surveillance, sero-surveillance, vaccination, and mathematical modelling. These initiatives generated an overwhelming amount of data that posed a challenge to researchers and public health officials, to effectively manage, analyse and promptly interpret for immediate pandemic response. As a result, there was demand for a platform to collate and integrate these datasets with interpretable findings to aid in pandemic management. In response, we developed a web-based dashboard, and integrated multidisciplinary datasets collected by the Ministry of Health-Kenya (MoH-K) and other research organizations, to support surveillance and monitoring of COVID-19 in Kenya. The developed dashboard combines genomics, epidemiological, seroprevalence, modelling, vaccination, syndromic and phylogenetic data and provides real-time updates to the public and health sector experts. The dashboard provides temporal trends of reported COVID-19 cases, fatalities, variants, and vaccination, in addition to summary reports from multiple cross-sectional seroprevalence studies and ongoing facility-based inpatient syndromic surveillance from 15 health facilities across Kenya. This is the first detailed interactive dashboard in Kenya that combines multiple datasets from a disease outbreak to provide valuable insights to researchers, health policy makers, the media and public not only during pandemic but also during routine surveillance. This resource is a model for digital platform for infectious disease surveillance and for informing public health planning and intervention.