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The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in more than 440 million confirmed cases globally and almost 6 million reported deaths as of March 2022. Consequently, the world experienced grave repercussions to citizens’ lives, health, wellness, and the economy. In responding to such a disastrous global event, countermeasures are often implemented to slow down and limit the virus’s rapid spread. Meanwhile, disaster recovery, mitigation, and preparation measures have been taken to manage the impacts and losses of the ongoing and future pandemics. Data-driven techniques have been successfully applied to many domains and critical applications in recent years. Due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of pandemic management, researchers have proposed and developed data-driven techniques across various domains. However, a systematic and comprehensive survey of data-driven techniques for pandemic management is still missing. In this article, we review existing data analysis and visualization techniques and their applications for COVID-19 and future pandemic management with respect to four phases (namely, Response, Recovery, Mitigation, and Preparation) in disaster management. Data sources utilized in these studies and specific data acquisition and integration techniques for COVID-19 are also summarized. Furthermore, open issues and future directions for data-driven pandemic management are discussed.
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Disaster Ergonomics: Human Factors in COVID-19 Pandemic Emergency Management
ObjectiveWe aimed to identify opportunities for application of human factors knowledge base to mitigate disaster management (DM) challenges associated with the unique characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic. BackgroundThe role of DM is to minimize and prevent further spread of the contagion over an extended period of time. This requires addressing large-scale logistics, coordination, and specialized training needs. However, DM-related challenges during the pandemic response and recovery are significantly different than with other kinds of disasters. MethodAn expert review was conducted to document issues relevant to human factors and ergonomics (HFE) in DM. ResultsThe response to the COVID-19 crisis has presented complex and unique challenges to DM and public health practitioners. Compared to other disasters and previous pandemics, the COVID-19 outbreak has had an unprecedented scale, magnitude, and propagation rate. The high technical complexity of response and DM coupled with lack of mental model and expertise to respond to such a unique disaster has seriously challenged the response work systems. Recent research has investigated the role of HFE in modeling DM systems’ characteristics to improve resilience, accelerating emergency management expertise, developing agile training methods to facilitate dynamically changing response, improving communication and coordination among system elements, mitigating occupational hazards including guidelines for the design of personal protective equipment, and improving procedures to enhance efficiency and effectiveness of response efforts. ConclusionThis short review highlights the potential for the field’s contribution to proactive and resilient DM for the ongoing and future pandemics.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1937053
- PAR ID:
- 10547605
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
- Volume:
- 62
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 0018-7208
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1061-1068
- Size(s):
- p. 1061-1068
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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