Public health surveillance tactics in place for the FIFA World Cup identified and confirmed a gastrointestinal virus surge in a host city.
The Health Security Operations Center (HSOC) has been leading an independent and collaborative public health effort during the soccer tournament, with more than 30 partners contributing public health surveillance and data that HSOC synthesizes and sends out in daily situation reports.
One of HSOC's communication partners is Katelyn Jetelina, PhD, MPH, creator of the widely read "Your Local Epidemiologist" newsletter that now has a listening research arm called Project Stethoscope, which has been activated for the World Cup. Jetelina's team is triangulating data sources with social listening on platforms like Reddit and Facebook, utilizing Google data, and conducting weekly surveys to World Cup attendees and people living within 30 miles of stadiums.
"Chatter can act as an early signal of health events that are happening that traditional epidemiological systems haven't necessarily picked up yet, or we haven't seen yet," Jetelina said during an HSOC press call.
Indeed, on the morning of June 10, Jetelina's team picked up "a social listening data signal around significant chatter about gastrointestinal symptoms in the Seattle area," she told MedPage Today. This chatter was detected on a general Reddit thread, not a World Cup-specific one. Jetelina's team escalated this information to the larger HSOC team and wastewater partners looked at data in and around Seattle and across Washington state.
