It would have been practically impossible to anticipate how the next year would play out in late 2019 when news stories about a mysterious respiratory ailment began to rise. Yet, headed by the World Health Organization, worldwide cooperation between multiple public health stakeholders was already in place, accompanied by a technical solution for global collaborative detection of threats to public health, their verification, and risk assessment (WHO).
The Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources, or EIOS, the initiative is a global collaboration of public health stakeholders to develop a unified, all-hazards, “One Health” approach to early detection of public health threats from publicly available sources, their verification, risk assessment, ongoing threat monitoring, situation analysis, and communication between relevant stakeholders to provide actionable intelligence for decision making.
The EIOS community of practice is supported by the EIOS system, which is based on a long-standing partnership between the WHO and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) (EC). The EIOS integrates other systems and players, encouraging collaborative development of new public health intelligence capabilities and features.
On December 31, 2019, the EIOS noticed a surge in pneumonia cases, and by the end of 2020, the system had seen a significant increase in data volume, with over 26 million tagged items relevant to the pandemic. These 26 million articles account for over 85% of all articles on EIOS, and there was an evident scalability difficulty owing to the significant growth in traffic throughout the year.
The WHO was contacted by Red Hat as part of the company’s Social Innovation Program, which assists nonprofit organizations with open source technology projects that help tackle the world’s most important problems. The two companies chose to work together on EIOS, and the resultant engagement provided the EIOS team with various recommendations on how to grow the platform even further.
This was accomplished by assisting in the troubleshooting of known scalability difficulties across many teams through joint sessions, finding bottlenecks collectively, and integrating all viewpoints in the final recommendations. Demonstrating to EIOS how to establish a consistent and dependable system utilizing infrastructure as a code approach, including the use of Ansible to automate deployments, was one of the collaboration’s two key objectives.
Prometheus and Grafana, both utilized as monitoring systems in EIOS settings, were also deployed using Ansible.
During the hard times for public health practice on a worldwide scale, Red Hat’s Social Innovation Program provided timely and essential help. With the fast international spread of COVID-19, a global flood of data put public health specialists and the EIOS system they rely on under tremendous strain.
During a critical period for the system’s operation, Red Hat professionals proved invaluable. They also gave appropriate, fit-for-purpose open-source solutions and ideas for enhancing the EIOS system’s performance and reliability.
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