About the team

The UW Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness has released a new daily newsletter that provides a succinct summary of the latest scientific literature related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each day, there is a firehose of new scientific information emerging about COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2. This initiative is an attempt to focus that hose to highlight new findings that are most relevant to the public health response.

To that end, a team of University of Washington graduate students and faculty from the Schools of Public Health and Medicine, led by Brandon Guthrie, PhD, and Jennifer Ross, MD MPH. Contributors include Molly Fischer MS, Sherrilynne Fuller PhD FACMI, Dylan Green MPH, Rodal Issema MPH, Wenwen Jiang MPH, Diana Louden MLib, Julianne Meisner BVM&S MS, Jessie Seiler MPH, Lorenzo Tolentino MPH, Diana Tordoff MPH, and Ashley Tseng MPH.

The team is providing daily reports that include brief summaries of 10-15 articles that they judge to have the highest public health relevance, along with additional links to pertinent commentaries and other resources. Each citation includes a link to the original article. At this time, the team are focused on the needs of public health professionals in Washington State, but hope to expand coverage to address global needs for up-to-date information.

Each day, the team conducts a systematic search of new references posted since the last report. Searches are conducted in PubMed and the pre-print databases medRxiv and bioRxiv. This results in approximately 400 to 1,000 search results each day. They then review all results for relevance and select the articles that will be included in the newsletter. The newsletter will be disseminated around 6:00 pm Pacific time each day, Monday through Friday.

The project is currently being conducted by the UW Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness and the START Center, in collaboration with and on behalf of the Washington State Department of Health. The report was originally developed and disseminated by the WA DOH COVID-19 Incident Management Team to support evidence-based decision making throughout the region.