Over recent months we have all experienced at first hand the dangers posed by highly infectious diseases. Only a few years ago, this was primarily considered to be a problem in underdeveloped, low-income regions. In 2014, with the aim of saving lives in these regions, Prof. Gérard Krause from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, started to develop a modular software that allowed outbreaks to be recognized early, their progression to be monitored, and health care resources to be deployed where they were needed. Together with a number of partners, he has developed this concept into a platform called SORMAS (Surveillance Outbreak Response Management and Analysis System) that is currently deployed in many regions of Africa and Europe in the management of 37 infectious diseases, including Ebola, malaria, cholera, measles – and now COVID-19.
SORMAS links specific epidemiological expertise to diverse data collection and processing systems. To manage the coronavirus pandemic in Germany, for example, it links data from German public health offices with the monitoring network at the Robert-Koch Institute and electronic symptom diaries of people who have tested positive. This not only simplifies many procedures at public health offices, but also supports cooperation between different government departments. The platform is available to each public health office in compliance with data protection laws, and is operated from a dedicated virtual server at the German Federal Information Technology Centre.
(Annual Report 2020)
