Social Determinant Trends of COVID-19: An Analysis Using Knowledge Graphs from Published Evidence and Online Trends.

This paper presents the results of a new approach to discover related health and social factors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The approach leverages a knowledge graph of related concepts mined from a corpus of published evidence (PubMed) prior to the pandemic. Population trends from online searches were used to identify social determinants of health (SDoH) concepts that trended high at the outset of the pandemic from a list of SDoH topics from the World Health Organization (WHO). The trending concepts were then mapped to the knowledge graph and a subsequent analysis of the derived insights, spanning two years, was conducted. This paper suggests an approach to derive new related health and social factors that may have either played a role in, or been affected by, the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, our results show how, from a list of SDoH topics, Food Security, Unemployment trended the highest at the start of the pandemic. Further work is needed to continue to ascertain the validity of the derived relations in a population health context and to improve mining insights from published evidence.

Exploring the Social Drivers of Health During a Pandemic: Leveraging Knowledge Graphs and Population Trends in COVID-19.

Social determinants of health (SDoH) are the factors which lie outside of the traditional health system, such as employment or access to nutritious foods, that influence health outcomes. Some efforts have focused on identifying vulnerable populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, both the short- and long-term social impacts of the pandemic on individuals and populations are not well understood. This paper presents a pipeline to discover health outcomes and related social factors based on trending SDoH at population-level using Google Trends. A knowledge graph was built from a corpus of research literature (PubMed) and the social determinants that trended high at the start of the pandemic were examined. This paper reports on related social and health concepts which may be impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak and may be important to monitor as the pandemic evolves. The proposed pipeline should have wider applicability in surfacing related social or clinical characteristics of interest, outbreak surveillance, or to mine relations between social and health concepts that can, in turn, help inform and support citizen-centred services.